


dropsonde (singers in a lower choir remix)

by openended



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: Babysitting, Birthday, Childbirth, Childhood, Closure, Cuddling & Snuggling, Dating, Declarations Of Love, Developing Relationship, Drinking, Engagement, F/M, Falling In Love, Flirting, Friendship, Gen, Marriage Proposal, Moving, Panic Attacks, Parenthood, Pregnancy, Toddlers, Wedding Fluff, Wedding Planning, Weddings, author has a theory about lighthouses and storms, author ports a mass effect andromeda protag into seattle grace hospital, i make no apologies for the sheer quantity of tswift references, past Addison/Derek, past Addison/Mark, seattle grace betting pool, talking about things like goddamn adults
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-25
Updated: 2020-10-01
Packaged: 2021-03-04 01:21:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 40,506
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24905239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/openended/pseuds/openended
Summary: Blessed are you, embrace of the falling, foundation of the light, master of the human accident.- Leonard Cohen,Book of Mercy[or, more helpfully: a rewrite of 2007-2008's Dropsonde & Shenzhou series. The one where, post-divorce, Addison and Derek hook up, accidentally make a baby, they end up with other people and it's a wholething.]
Relationships: Addison Montgomery & Derek Shepherd, Alex Karev/Addison Montgomery, Meredith Grey/Derek Shepherd
Comments: 76
Kudos: 35





	1. never had a shotgun shot in the dark

**Author's Note:**

> Oh jeez. I didn't intend to revisit this, I really didn't, but then _gestures at everything_ here we are. I've no idea how far I'll get through this or if there's an audience, but working on it keeps me stable which is more than I can say for my meds right now so I'll take the win.
> 
> A few notes!  
> 1) This is gonna be in order. None of the original's "here's an eleven-chapter fic, and six months later here's a twelve-chapter fic that's meant to go between two chapters in the first" nonsense. We're going through and filling in all the blanks. Chapter division got a little fuzzy and doesn't map exactly to the original, so we have new chapter titles too!
> 
> 2) An extremely important reminder, especially if you're new to this series (hi! welcome!), is that this was written while Season 3 was airing. As such, it takes a sharp left turn off the canon rails in S3. 
> 
> 3) I've made precisely zero effort to map technology and pop culture to 2006-2008. If Miranda Bailey's pregnancy can last a handful of episodes but the interns need three seasons to go through a single year, I can stick an iPhone into S3.
> 
> Here we go!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in the beginning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title from "Getaway Car," Taylor Swift

Addison stares at the pair of scuffed brown heels scattered across the entryway in front of her. She stares harder, trying to make them into something they’re not. But the living room lamps are on timers during the week and the ugly one on the end table turns on, illuminating a woman’s shirt tossed over the back of the couch and a pair of black men’s shoes toed off in the hall.

The shirt isn’t hers, either. She doesn’t do shiny and hot pink, separately or in combination.

“Fine,” she says to the empty room.

A muffled moan from the master bedroom answers her.

She clenches her jaw and sets her shoulders and walks into the darkened kitchen. Without turning on any lights, she takes the shopping list pad off the fridge, rips off the reminder to buy toothpaste and bread and throws it in the trash, and picks a pen out of the cup sitting beside the toaster. She writes her note, clicks the pen before putting it back, and puts the paper on the fridge again, perfectly centered.

She opens the refrigerator, removes a bottle of water, an apple, and the chocolate bar she’s kept in there so it doesn’t melt while their heating’s on the fritz. Without another glance toward the master bedroom, she walks out of the apartment, carefully stepping over the scuffed heels on her way.

Mark finds the note several hours later.

_We’re done, now. – A_

***

From the walkway, Derek watches Addison storm out of her car and up the sidewalk. Before she walks through the open doors, she pauses – a little pause he doubts anyone else notices – and lets out a short exhale. She nods. The storm clouds haven’t entirely cleared from her face, but they’re not quite threatening tornadoes anymore. She walks inside and disappears from his view.

He frowns.

It’s four hours before he finally has a chance to talk to her.

“Don’t,” she says.

“Addison.” He follows her into the empty elevator.

“I thought I was okay with it, and I was, but then I woke up. And actually I think I’m going to kill him. Killing him seems like a good idea.”

He blinks. “I wouldn’t recommend murder. You’d get blood all over you and that’s a very nice dress.” They’re surgeons, scrubs aren’t exactly difficult to find. And they’re surgeons: _bloody_ scrubs aren’t exactly odd. But she’s clearly standing on a ledge and he still cares enough to keep her from jumping off it.

She slowly turns and stares at him. “I’d use poison,” she says flatly.

He pulls out the emergency stop. “Okay, what are we talking about?” He has a theory, one he doesn’t really like, but there’s always a chance that he’s wrong.

“I came home to someone else’s shoes in the hallway.”

Not wrong, then. It was a small chance.

“I know that feeling,” he says without thinking. Gauging her reaction, he decides to let the sentence stand; she’s calm for the situation, proclamations of murder aside. It’s like she expected this of Mark, was waiting for it to happen. Derek supposes he was waiting for it, too.

She scoffs and rolls her eyes. “Anyway.” She pushes the emergency stop. The alarm silences and the elevator begins rising again.

“For what it’s worth,” he says just before they stop at her floor, “I’m sorry.” They’re divorced, and it’s for the best, but he still wishes her happiness – even if it was with the guy she cheated on him with.

“Thanks,” she says. With a steadying breath, she steps off the elevator.

***

Derek’s brow furrows when his headlights land on her car. She’s parked outside the trailer exactly where, up until a month and a half ago, Meredith had parked. He tries not to make too many parallels.

Addison forgot to give her keys back after the divorce and he kept forgetting to ask. She hated the trailer so much, he honestly never expected her to set foot out here again. The lights are off and that’s enough to push his brain from confusion into concern.

“Addison?” He calls out softly, shutting the door behind him.

“In here,” she says from the bedroom.

He pauses in the doorway; he made the bed this morning and even in the shadows he sees the rumpled covers still in place.

“ _Down_ here,” she specifies.

He looks down and finds her sitting on the floor in a corner. “Why are you on the floor?” That seems a more important question than why she’s in his trailer at all. He can take a guess at that one, but he has no idea about the floor.

She exhales sharply and looks up at him. “I was going for the bed, but then I started to feel weird about it and none of those chairs,” she gestures out toward the small living area, “are comfortable.”

“And the floor is?” He offers her his hand. She takes it and he helps her up.

“No,” she says. She tucks her hair behind her ear. “But it was better than just standing around or waiting in my car.”

He gently leads her out of the bedroom to one of the chairs she finds so objectionable. He flips on low lights so they aren’t sitting in total darkness. “Why _are_ you here?” Time to get an answer to that one.

Derek turns to make something that could pass for dinner; they were both in surgery when dinner should have happened, and if he still knows her as well as he thinks he does, she didn’t stop anywhere on the way from the hospital. She changed, at least, exchanging the green patterned dress for black leggings and a blue long-sleeved shirt.

She tucks her long legs up and to her chest, resting her bare heels on the red seat. “I actually don’t have anywhere else to go and the Archfield’s booked until tomorrow.”

He looks over his shoulder. “Where’d you stay last night?” She and Mark moved in together a few months ago, which he thought was a good sign for the two of them. He supposes it was, for a while.

“Crashed on Burke’s couch,” she says. At his raised eyebrow, she explains. “He doesn’t ask questions and I knew Cristina was on call.”

He turns the dial to four, just how she likes it, and pulls the lever on her toast. He leans against the counter, pressing his palms on the laminate top behind him. “Are you okay?”

Addison sighs. “No.” She looks at her pale reflection in the window. Tree branches blow heavily in the wind, heralding an oncoming storm. “I thought it was going to work this time, you know? Finally. We’d been together a year, moved in together, everything was fine. But,” she shrugs, “instead, I’m sitting inside my ex-husband’s trailer – which I still _hate_ , by the way – because I can’t go home and the stupid hotel is booked.”

He decides not to mention that there are plenty of other hotels in Seattle, even plenty of other hotels close to the hospital. Her toast pops up and he leans the two pieces of bread together on the plate to cool off. “Butter and jam?” He turns the dial to six and puts up his own toast.

She nods. “Please.” She looks down at her hands. “Sorry I just showed up. By the time I thought about calling, I was already here and there’s still no service.”

Derek shrugs. “It’s okay,” he says, because it is. If Meredith were here, it’d be a different story, but Meredith isn’t here. Meredith hasn’t been here for a month and a half and Addison knew that. “I know you were set on poison, but do you want me to kill him for you?”

She laughs roughly at that and shakes her head. “He’ll suffer more if I just never speak to him again. Thank you, though.”

He spreads butter and strawberry jam on her toast, does the same for his, pours them both a glass of water, and sits opposite her at the table.

They eat in silence. He keeps an eye on Addison and watches her grow more and more distant as her toast disappears.

“Addison,” he says when he stands to put their plates into the dishwasher.

“I’m fine,” she says, though she’s clearly everything but. She sniffles, takes a quiet breath, and looks back out the window.

He turns the lights off, letting her stare into the woods instead of back at her own reflection. His eyes slowly adjust to the clouded moonlight and he watches as her shoulders start to shake. He takes a step forward across the tiny galley kitchen and then hesitates. “Do you need a hug?”

It’s a stupid question, of course she needs a hug, but they’re in strange territory right now: divorced, but friends, in his trailer as she cries over the guy that kickstarted their divorce.

After a moment’s pause, she nods. He slides into the booth beside her and settles his arm around her shoulders. She turns toward him, trying to curl into his embrace, and hits her knee on the table. She wasn’t quite crying before, but banging her knee on the metal kitchen table pushes her over the edge.

Derek senses immediately that this isn’t going to work: the booth is too narrow for the two of them and she’s about to lose it entirely. Keeping his arm around her, he slides back out and encourages her to follow him. It’s only three steps into the bedroom, where he settles them on his bed.

A split second of tension passes through her body, but he knows the exact moment she lets go. She buries her face in his shoulder, loops her arms around his shoulders, and starts to cry.

As a soft rain starts outside, he holds her close and strong. He should have known that everything he saw today in the hospital was an act: a carefully-constructed façade of Addison being Totally Okay. He’s seen it before, though at the time it was him she was pretending to be okay with, not Mark.

He doesn’t say anything, just rubs her back and lets her cry.

Addison calms after a while and pulls back from him. She reaches behind her, grabs the box of tissues on the nightstand and blows her nose. She toys with the edges of the tissue for a moment before crumpling it up into a ball and tossing it toward the basket in the corner; she makes the shot. “I’m not actually surprised,” she says, her voice hoarse. She coughs, clearing her throat, and stares at her hands. “He cheated on me in New York, too,” she admits.

Derek frowns. He hadn’t known that. Then again, there’s a lot about New York that he doesn’t know.

“Still sucks though,” she says. She looks up with a defeated look in her eyes.

He reaches out and brushes a stray tear away from her cheek. “He doesn’t deserve you,” he says quietly.

She laughs humorlessly and looks away, shaking her head. “Yeah, no kidding.” Her teeth worry at her lower lip. “Thanks for saying it, though.”

The rain picks up into a proper storm. Wind blows through the trees, rustling leaves that haven’t yet fallen. Something shifts between them, in the very air inside the trailer. She’s hurting, he’s hurting, and for the first time in years, the hurt isn’t the other’s fault.

He leans in closer and brushes a kiss against her temple. She smiles; he can see it even in the dim light. He leans back, giving her space again, but she leans with him, keeping the scant distance between them. Raindrops _plink_ on the metal roof of the trailer and he settles his palm on her lower back. Her shirt’s ridden up and his thumb catches bare skin.

“This is not a thing,” she whispers, leaning closer as his fingers drift across her spine.

“No,” Derek agrees, dropping his gaze to her lips, “it’s not.” He closes the distance between them, kissing her as lightning flashes outside.

Her reason for being here forgotten, Addison settles her arms around his neck, threading her fingers through his hair as she kisses him in return while thunder rolls across the lake.

***

And that would’ve been the end of it, had Addison not found herself sitting in front of a toilet eight weeks later, throwing up breakfast for the third day in a row.


	2. we built this house with our hands

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> several revelations, several arguments, and a date

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Virgin," Manchester Orchestra

Addison flushes the toilet and leans against the bathtub. She lowers her head between her knees, closes her eyes, and focuses on getting the world to spin a little slower. Getting it to stop spinning at all would be ideal, but that's a pipe dream right now. She aims low.

For two days, she’s tried to convince herself that she ate something she shouldn’t have. Or that she’s just more stressed than normal. Or that she’s coming down with something. None of the excuses quite stuck and all of them fell flat this afternoon when she looked at a calendar and realized she was over five weeks late. Her periods have run like clockwork for three years.

The last time she was pregnant, morning sickness plagued her right up until she walked out of a clinic in Midtown. She was five weeks late then, too.

With a slow exhale, she opens her eyes. The world still tilts and spins, but tolerably so. She crawls forward and grabs onto the sink for support. Slowly, carefully, and without an ounce of grace, she stands up. She blinks at herself in the mirror: even in the darkness of a hotel bathroom with all the lights turned off, she’s decidedly paler than normal. It isn’t anything a little extra makeup won’t conceal.

Before she starts her makeup, she rips open a packet of Pepto Bismol caplets and pops both into her mouth. She crinkles her nose at the taste, but swallows the chalky substance and swishes a mouthful of water around her teeth. It’ll be enough to get her to the hospital where she can get some proper anti-nausea drugs.

With a steadying breath, she steels her shoulders. “Eyeliner,” she says to herself. “Eyeliner will help.”

***

Eyeliner does help, marginally, but what will help more is confirmation.

“Karev,” she says quietly but firmly, when she finally catches him in an empty hallway. With a sharp jerk of her head that she immediately regrets, she directs him into an unoccupied exam room. It’ll look suspicious when they leave, and she doesn’t really want _more_ rumors with her at the center, but at least the rumor will be that they’re having sex, not that anything’s wrong with her. She can deal with the sex rumors.

“What?” he asks when she doesn’t immediately explain why she’s dragged him in here.

“I need you to do a full blood workup, including a pregnancy test.” She knows that he well knows what’s involved in a full blood workup, but what she really needs out of it is the pregnancy test, not a lipid panel. Better to emphasize.

He blinks at her. “On who?”

“Me, Alex,” she says. She thought that would’ve been obvious. Judging by the circles under his eyes, the last time he ingested something that didn’t include the words _energy drink_ was a solid three days ago. Assumptions probably need to be stated. “And,” she sighs, “I need you to not label it mine. The last thing I need is a rumor going around that I’m pregnant.” _At least_ , she silently adds, _not until I know for sure_.

His eyes narrow in confusion and, if she’s not hallucinating in the dim room, a little bit of concern. “You got it.”

***

A few hours later, Alex knocks lightly on her office door. He waits for her quiet acknowledgment and then gently shuts the door behind him. Her office is dark without a single light turned on; the hallway light coming around the closed blinds gives him just enough illumination to make out furniture. He sees a shadow on the black couch. “Don’t move,” he says, “I’ll come to you.”

“Thanks,” she says weakly and slowly shifts so she’s sitting. She pushes at her hair, trying to put it back in order; more _hot neonatal surgeon,_ less _been throwing up all morning and have been lying on my couch for two hours_.

He sits beside her and hands her a prescription bottle: pregnancy-safe anti-nausea meds she hadn’t asked for, but that her pale and slightly-green complexion earlier told him she needed. He follows it with a bottle of water.

“You’re a life saver,” she says. She opens the pill bottle, takes two, and chases them with half the water.

When she’s capped the water bottle, he hands her the lab printout. He's not surprised that it came back positive; he doubts she would’ve asked if she didn’t already know.

She reaches over and turns on a lamp and then puts on her glasses. She takes a deep breath and looks at the results. “Okay,” she says quietly, followed by a long, slow exhale.

He shifts his weight, turning toward her. The entire hospital knows by now that she and Sloan split – he’d known the day after, when Sloan snapped at him more than usual. The kid has to be Sloan’s and he can’t see any way that this isn’t going to be a mess for her.

“It’s not Mark’s,” she says softly, as if she could hear his thoughts.

Alex blinks at her in the dim lamp light. She’s still staring at the lab printout, fingertip brushing over the pregnancy section. There’s something in her voice that strikes a chord. It isn’t his place to ask, but he does anyway; he’s going on twenty-two hours without sleep and the worst she can do is tell him to shove off. “Whose is it?”

“Derek’s.”

His eyes go wide and Alex isn't sure that he'd be able to control that reaction on all the sleep in the world.

“I know,” she says with a quiet little laugh. “The night after I caught Mark, I didn’t have anywhere else to go, so I ended up at his trailer. It sort of…happened," she gestures with the printout.

Alex smiles back at her; he can see that, beneath confusion and fear and nausea, she’s happy about this. Between her, Shepard, Grey, Sloan, and the history between them all, it’s gonna be a _shitshow_. But she’s happy. And that's worth something. “Secret’s safe,” he promises.

***

Addison stands in the empty hallway outside Derek’s office. She shakes out her shoulders and stretches her neck first to the left, then to the right. She lets out the breath she’s been holding since the elevator and blows out her cheeks as she exhales.

She’s had a week to practice this conversation, a week to figure out how to start it with something slightly less direct than _I’m pregnant, it’s yours_. A full week and she’s come up with a whole lot of nothing.

They’d gone back to work the next morning as if nothing had happened at all, with normal smiles and normal banter. They were on their way to friendship and _this is not a thing_. But she has paperwork in her hands that proves this is very much a thing. A good thing, sure, but a thing nonetheless.

And a thing made far more complicated by his and Meredith’s reconciliation two weeks ago.

She counts and promises herself that when she gets to ten she really will knock on his open door and stop loitering just out of sight in the hallway. It takes her until twenty-three, but she takes one final breath and steps into the doorway. She knocks lightly.

Derek looks up and beckons her in with a welcoming smile. Her nervousness settles a little. She shuts the door behind her. The carpet muffles her heels as she walks to the couch identical to hers upstairs; she sits down in the corner and crosses her legs. She smooths her hands over her black and white skirt. There’s a plant on the verge of dying on the table beside her and she wonders if _you should water this_ might not be the opening she’s been looking for all week. It’s a terrible lead for _I’m pregnant, it’s yours_ , but at least it’s not jumping in headfirst.

“What’s wrong?” His voice is laced with concern.

She realizes she’s been silent for the few minutes while she fiddles with a throw pillow that doesn’t quite match the blanket tossed behind her. To anyone else, she’d just look tired and distracted from a long day. But to Derek, who’s known her for twenty years, she's sure it must be a signal fire.

“It’s not really _wrong_ ,” she says softly, staring at her hands and the manicure that's just shy of being overdue, “more of _awkward_.”

An understatement.

She looks up from her fingers and finds him staring at her with worried eyes. _Might as well jump_. “I’m pregnant, Derek.” _Going with headfirst after all, then._

He nods and she sees the wheels turning in his mind: being pregnant with Mark’s child would _absolutely_ be awkward. But that's not the awkward she's talking about and she shakes her head, stopping him from even starting down that path.

“I did math,” she starts. Pregnancy math isn’t an exact science, but she’s been doing this for other people a long time. “It’s not Mark’s,” she says, matter-of-factly. She keeps her eyes on him, studying his face for his reaction.

Derek blinks. Once, twice, three times, and then he tilts his head, as if that will help him process everything. And then it clicks. “It’s _mine_?”

Addison nods. “Yeah." She hadn’t expected him to jump out of his chair for joy, but she’d feel less unsteady if he gave her something a little more than stunned silence. A baby is something she can do on her own – financially, physically, mentally. She doesn’t need him for it. But she does need him to at least _react_ to the information. When the stunned silence continues for thirty seconds past uncomfortable, she says as much.

"Sorry," he says, "that was a lot of," he stops suddenly. "Wow."

"Yep." Silence follows again and she wonders if she needed to spend some of her energy figuring out how to _leave_ this particular conversation, not just start it.

He still looks stunned – which, if she’s being honest with herself, is how she’s felt for the past week too – but a faint sparkle rapidly reaches his eyes. Her breath shakes and she doesn’t trust her voice. Instead, she offers him a small smile as he visibly reaches a decision.

Derek sits next to her, folding one leg up onto the couch under him so he can face her directly. “I’m going to be here,” he promises. “For everything.”

Her smile widens and she nods. Just because she can do this on her own doesn't mean she wants to. In whatever capacity he offers, she'll take it. “Thanks.” She takes an uneven breath. “This is actually happening,” she whispers.

Derek draws her in for a hug. “We’ll make it work.”

“Yeah,” she says, hugging him in return. “We will.”

***

Derek’s let her rant for fifteen minutes straight without interrupting her. He finally told her about the pregnancy after dinner, almost a month after Addison told him. They were broken up at the time, with no indication that they were going to get back together, so he doesn’t think Meredith has much of a leg to stand on with this rant, but the baby will affect him, and thus her, so she needs to rant.

“Meredith,” he says when he spies a break in the ranting. He tries to keep his voice even and not yell – he’d want to rant too if he were in her position – but he’s been hearing variations on _I can’t believe you slept with her_ for fifteen minutes. 

“We have a moment and you sleep with your ex-wife? What the hell, Derek?”

“It wasn’t ‘a moment,’” he says, “we were broken up. For several weeks at that point.”

She scoffs and pushes her hair out of her eyes. “You’re gonna use the _we were on a break_ line?”

“No,” he says evenly, “because we weren’t. You told me we were done and stormed out of here.”

“So this is _my_ fault?”

He doesn’t dignify that with a response. “She walked in on Mark cheating on her _again_ and didn’t have anywhere else to go. She came here and it just happened.”

Meredith stops her pacing across the small space and turns. She tilts her head. “And you got her pregnant.”

He presses his lips together. “Not intentionally.”

“You are both very smart people and you were both very _very_ stupid.” She huffs and shoves her hair out of the way again.

She isn’t wrong.

“Meredith,” he says quietly, “I want this baby. But Addison and I aren’t getting back together – that’s done.” They briefly talked about it the night Addison told him, but only long enough to learn they were both in agreement about that chapter being firmly closed.

“Good,” she says.

“But I want this baby,” he repeats. “And I want you. If you’re not willing to make that work, if you’re not willing to accept my child as part of this,” he gestures between them, “then we’re done, too.” He hates giving ultimatums, but his child is non-negotiable.

Meredith suddenly goes very still. “I get to be mad, because it is a complicated, awkward mess. It’s always been a complicated, awkward mess with Addison. But I love you, Derek. I’m not going to leave over this.” She shakes her head and exhales, blowing her bangs out of her eyes.

They stand in silence, with only the wind and crickets outside.

“Thank you,” he says softly.

***

“So I hear you’re pregnant,” Mark says, leaning up against the counter at the nurse’s station.

Addison looks up from the chart she’s reading and exhales sharply. “That happened fast,” she mutters. Derek told Meredith twelve hours ago. Though he asked her to keep it quiet, Meredith is genetically incapable of keeping a secret like this from Cristina and discretion isn’t either of their strong suits.

She smiles tightly at the nurse who’s suddenly very interested in what's happening between the two attendings standing in front of her. “I’m not having this conversation in public,” she says, standing up straight, carrying the chart with her. Without indicating that he’s supposed to follow her, she leads Mark out of the public hallway and up to her office. They pass three perfectly-good empty exam rooms and two open on-call rooms on the way, but she's done with rumors and she's done letting him have any inch of authority. They're doing this on _her_ turf, not his and not neutral ground.

He’s silent the entire way, as is she. Tension radiates off him as he silently seethes in the elevator, filling the small space so completely she can hardly breathe. The door opens and she doesn't give him the satisfaction of seeing her exhale in relief. She opens her office door and sharply gestures him inside.

“What the hell – ” he starts, whirling around on her once he's barely inside, but she levels a white-hot glare in his direction. He stops just as suddenly as he started and even takes a step back.

Smart man.

Addison shuts the door behind her. “No. You do not get to yell at me,” she says with quiet, contained anger. “I gave you another chance and you cheated on me. What I did after that is my business.”

“So you went to _Derek_?”

The fact that he doesn’t immediately apologize for the cheating, or even react to the accusation, tells her everything she needs to know. It’s been two and a half months and he hasn’t said a word about the cheating, not even when they crossed paths when she was packing her belongings, not even now when it’s finally front and center. It’s a relief not to have to fight that fight.

She has to fight _this_ fight instead, but at least it’s not yet another round of _I’m sorry, give me another shot_.

Addison takes a deep breath and keeps her eyes locked on his, daring him to break first. “I moved in with you,” she says, “I didn’t have anywhere to go. The hotel was booked and I sure as hell wasn’t going to go home.” She bites down on _home_. He flinches at the accusation and a flicker of victory sparks in her chest.

But he recovers quickly. “So you screw your ex-husband as revenge?”

She throws her head back and laughs, incredulous. For a moment, she’s completely speechless and just shakes her head while he glares at her. “It wasn’t _revenge,_ Mark,” she says through an exasperated sigh. “If it was revenge, you would’ve known about it long before now. And I don’t have to explain myself to you. Not anymore.” She narrows her eyes and stares through him with an icy glare. He lost all rights to any explanations the minute he walked into their apartment with another woman.

He clenches his jaw. “Why are you so eager to keep his, but so willing to throw mine away?”

Stunned, Addison just looks at him for a full ten seconds. It's not even apples and oranges, it's apples and _sandcastles_. She nearly says so, but a twitch to his jaw changes her mind. He's trying to twist a dagger she's already removed. “I don’t owe you anything. Get out.”

Mark holds her gaze for another moment and storms past her and out the door without a word. The cloud of anger stays in the room behind him long after he's gone.

Eventually, Addison lets out a slow, measured breath. "Well," she says to herself. "I suppose that could've gone worse."

***

It takes an hour.

Mark passes a nurse’s station, muttering about dirty mistresses and divorces and pregnancies and looking like he's strongly interested in finding someone to punch. George overhears something in the cafeteria line. And then a lab tech takes a fifty-dollar bribe to remember he did a rush job on a full workup last month for a Jane Doe who pointedly did not have a chart to attach the results to. Sixty minutes and her pregnancy is hospital-wide news.

When Izzie slides into the seat across him in the courtyard, brimming with news, Alex steals her French fries and pretends to be surprised by the information. He gives noncommittal answers when the others join them. Around the fourth time Meredith has to glare someone into leaving their table alone, he invents a flimsy excuse and leaves.

Bailey immediately drags him into the Pit. Whether it's out of desperation or preternatural knowledge of his tangential involvement in the current rumor spotlight, he isn't sure. But he's thankful for the distraction and the excuse to avoid Sloan for the rest of the day. He finally gets a break after sunset and he uses it to find Addison. Though it isn’t his duty to check in on her – Torres or Bailey or even Shepherd have first dibs on that – he can't imagine her day has been particularly easy.

Alex knocks softly. There's no response, but soft light filters underneath the door. The lights have motion sensors: she's in there. He knocks again, a little louder this time. He looks up and down the hallway – she has enough to worry about without adding him to the mess – and steps closer, pressing his ear to the door. Instead of a phone conversation or even silence, he hears quiet, muffled sobs.

For a moment, he toys with the idea of letting her be. The moment passes when he remembers that he’s here to check on her and no one else is having that same idea right now. One last look in the hallway and he opens the door and steps inside. He locks it behind him. Sloan's gone for the day, but Alex isn't sure he trusts him to _stay_ gone. Not today, at least.

“Dr. Montgomery?” he calls softly, alerting her to his presence.

She’s sitting on her couch with her knees drawn to her chest, staring at the wall in front of her. The blinds around the floor-to-ceiling windows are drawn tight, blocking out hallway light and prying eyes. He slowly sits down next to her and puts a hand on her shoulder. “Addison?” Her first name sounds strange on his lips. Strange, but in a way he could get used to, if he'd let himself. If she'd let him. He shakes that thought away.

“Hey, Alex.”

“Sloan didn’t take it so well?” He knows the answer, but it’s a good start to the conversation.

She snorts, a rough, sardonic sound he wasn’t aware she could make. “Not really.” She wipes her nose with a crumpled tissue and a few tears spill over onto her cheeks. “I don’t even know why I care,” she whispers. “Or,” she looks up at him in a moment of lucidity, “why I’m telling _you_ this.”

Alex hears the point in her voice: bloodwork is one thing, deep relationship stuff is something else entirely. But he’s here. He says as much.

“Fair point,” she acknowledges. “Besides,” she says after a moment, “Miranda gets judgy. I mean, she’s _absolutely_ right, but I’ve had enough judgy today.”

He lifts his arm, sliding it around her shoulders when she doesn't move away. She leans into him, just a little, but it’s enough he can smell her conditioner. Vanilla. It’s nice. She rests her head on his shoulder and sniffles. He tightens his embrace and brushes his thumb against her arm. “What can I do?” he asks after a few minutes.

Groaning, she sits up. Even in the dim light, he sees all the color drain from her face. “Right now,” she says in a shaky tone, “I need a trash can.”

He leans over the side of the couch and grabs the trash can. It’s barely within her line of sight before she empties her lunch into it. Alex grimaces and sweeps her hair out of her face. With his other hand, he gently rubs her back.

She coughs and presses the back of her hand against her mouth. “Thanks,” she says hoarsely.

“You good?” He’ll take the trash can away, but only if she’s done with it.

“I think so.” She sits up.

He stands up and puts the trash can back where he found it and then takes a bottle of water out of her mini fridge she’s using as a shelf for a spider plant. “Meds not working?” He sits back down beside and digs in his lab coat pocket for the pack of gum he slipped in there this morning.

Holding the cold bottle to the back of her neck for a moment before she drinks it, she shrugs. “They’ve been fine. I think the thing with Mark just…” she trails off and waves her hand through the air. She looks down at the gum he offers her. “What are you, Mary Poppins?” She takes a piece.

He grins. “Nah, Sloan hates it.”

It takes her a second, but then she understands and returns the grin. She cracks her gum. “Yes, he does.” She goes serious again and tilts her head, staring at him with a look he couldn’t decipher even if all the lights were on and he had a translator. “Thanks for checking on me, Alex.”

“You got it,” he says.

She leans back, resting her head on the back of the couch, and starts to laugh. Her laugh’s a genuine, full-bodied thing, a whole world away from the tears he walked into.

“What?” he asks. She’s clearly not laughing at _him_ , but five minutes ago she was crying and now she’s laughing like someone told the funniest joke in the world.

She shakes her head and laughs even harder. “This is just. This is _ridiculous,_ ” she says. She rubs a hand across her forehead. “All of this.”

Alex smiles in silent agreement. He gives it a minute and then jumps. “Can I take you to dinner?” He’s wanted to ask for over a year, but then she got back together with Sloan and so he screwed a couple nurses and pushed her to the back of his mind. And now they're here.

That puts a sudden stop to her laughter and she looks at him with her brows knotted in confusion. “Seriously?”

It’s not a bad _seriously_ , so he nods. “Yeah.”

There must be something in his voice that gives away that he’s actually asking her out on a date, not just offering free dinner for a friend, because she squints even harder at him. It’s cute. He bites back a smile.

“With the thing,” she gestures to her abdomen, “and the other thing?” she gestures aimlessly.

“With the thing and the other thing.”

She gives him a look that tells him she thinks he’s out of his mind for willingly getting involved with _the thing and the other thing_ , but she nods. “Yeah.” The corner of her mouth quirks upward in a smile. “I’d like that.”

***

Derek looks up as Addison’s car beeps, unlocking next to him. “Hey,” he says as she walks between their cars, bag slung over one shoulder. She’s uncharacteristically in sneakers, the straps of her heels threaded through her fingers. It’s an odd look paired with the designer skirt and top.

“Hey.” She opens the door of her Mercedes and slides the bag and shoes into the passenger seat.

“You okay?” he asks. She looks a little off balance. Plus the shoes.

She bumps the door shut and leans against her car. “Mark yelled at me and Alex asked me out.”

He skips over the Alex part for now. He'd heard about the yelling. He doubts there's a doctor in the entire state of Washington who hasn't heard about the yelling. “How bad?”

She shrugs and looks up at the night sky. “He's Mark," she says. There was more to that sentence when she started it, but Derek's known him even longer than she has. He can fill in the blanks. "How’d Meredith take it?”

He stuffs his hands in his pockets and stares at the ground. “She yelled,” he says and looks back up at Addison, “but I think she’ll be okay with it.” He pauses. “If you need me to say something to Mark…”

Shaking her head, Addison silently cuts him off. “I can fight my own battles, Derek.”

Of that, he’s well aware. “Karev really asked you out?” he says after a moment.

She laughs a little and shakes her head in astonishment. “This has been such a weird day.”

He grins at her and opens his door. There’s leftover Chinese and a beer back at the trailer calling his name. “Have fun.”

She returns the grin, bright and wide. “Good night, Derek.”

***

Three weeks pass before they find time for their date. It isn’t for lack of trying, but emergencies happen, and Mark seems to be aware of what they’re trying to do and finds every possible excuse to keep Alex at the hospital late. But eventually, they find a night when their schedules line up, no one’s coding or being rushed into surgery, and Mark has either given up or can’t find anything. It's an unassuming Wednesday a week into her second trimester when Addison and Alex make it out the hospital door and to dinner.

In those three weeks, Addison’s found a decently-sized condo, moved in, and made an attempt at furnishing it. She can’t raise a baby in a hotel room, isn’t ready for a house, and moving when she’s heavily pregnant sounded horrible enough that she found a real estate agent six hours after she thought of the idea. She doesn’t have a kitchen table yet, much less any baby furniture, and she certainly hasn’t painted, but it’s starting to feel like maybe one day soon it’ll feel like home.

And it’s on the front steps of that building that Alex kisses her for the first time. It’s a simple kiss, gentle and no tongue, but it still takes her breath away.

Addison pulls back and places her hand on his chest. She lightly grabs his shirt in her fingertips, and then lets go. If circumstances were different, she’d kiss him again, this time with tongue, and then hint strongly that she’d be interested in a lot more upstairs if he is; she’s long grown up past the three date rule. But the circumstances are that she’s pregnant with her ex-husband’s baby, is still reeling a little from breaking up with the man she left her husband for, and she thinks she’s maybe starting to fall for the man standing in front of her.

It may have taken three weeks to finally go on a date, but there were plenty of looks and private hugs in the meantime. They eat lunch in her office nearly every chance they get. Alex even makes a point to send her a text and check in whenever she disappears for a few hours. He might be a cocky, smug asshole at times, but Alex certainly isn’t Mark. Addison would never admit it to anyone, but it’s nice to be wrong once in a while.

“I’d invite you up,” she starts quietly. At his playful smirk, she scrunches her nose. “For _coffee_ ,” she clarifies. “But life is happening a little fast right now.”

He nods and takes the hand that’s resting on his chest and laces his fingers through hers. “I get it.”

She ducks her head and squeezes his hand. “I had a good time,” she says and looks up at him. “A _really_ good time. So if you’re good with taking things slow…”

“I am,” he says. He leans in and kisses her again. Just as brief, just as gentle, still without tongue, but it’s enough to warm her down to her toes.

Oh yeah. She’s _definitely_ falling for the man in front of her.


	3. i want you more than a memory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> fistfights and friendship and furniture, oh my

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Find What You're Looking For," Jax Anderson

Addison is in with a patient when the fight breaks out and she doesn’t see who throws the first punch. She leaves the exam room with intentions of getting iced tea and going back to her office where she’s stashed strawberries in her fridge. But she steps out to see a fight in full swing. She clenches her teeth. Her strawberries will have to wait.

Derek shoves Mark off of him and follows it up with a right hook, connecting solidly with Mark’s jaw. Mark stumbles into the railing but quickly finds his footing and bull rushes Derek, catching him around the waist. They both fall to the floor and Mark’s face is full of targeted fury, like he’s about to start pummeling Derek.

Addison shakes herself out of her shock. There's only one thing – one _person_ – this fight is about. There's only one person this fight has ever been about. In another life, she'd be flattered that this is the second time two men have to come to blows over her. But that's another life, eleven years ago and three time zones east, and this isn't cute or flattering. It's _ridiculous_.

“Knock it _off_!” Her voice is enough to cut through the small crowd’s murmurs – the crowd that stood around doing nothing while two doctors beat the crap out of each other, the crowd that mostly decides _now_ is a good time to be literally anywhere else – but not enough to cut through whatever haze is clouding both Mark’s and Derek’s minds.

It’s only Alex, taking an opening to hook his arms around Mark and haul him off of Derek, that keeps Mark from following through on the punch he winds up for.

“Let _go_ ,” Mark orders through clenched teeth as he struggles against Alex.

Alex only tightens his grasp, pulling Mark farther away from Derek.

The very small part of Addison that isn't blinded by sheer fury is a little turned on by Alex's strength and how easily he subdues Mark. She files that away for later.

“What the hell are you doing?” Addison steps forward. “You know what, no,” she holds up her hand, palm open, when Mark starts to speak, “I don’t care. Both of you,” she turns to face Derek, bleeding but now held back similarly (though with a little less success) by Burke, "grow _up_.” She looks back at Mark. “This happened. If you're mad about it, there's only one person to blame." She steps closer, half an inch into his personal space. "And it's not me and it's not Derek.”

Mark looks like he's about to say something, but Alex shifts his grip, twisting Mark's shoulders, and any words slip away in a hiss of pain. Addison holds Mark's gaze for a split second longer than she's comfortable with and then whirls around on Derek. "And I distinctly remember telling _you_ that I can fight my own battles."

She crosses her arms and catches sight of Meredith at the edges of the thinning crowd. Meredith gives her a little nod of solidarity: she looks about as pissed as Addison feels. By all rights they should hate each other, and maybe they do a little, but right now at least they can agree on this.

Richard clears his throat from a few feet away and anyone still lingering around rapidly finds something else to be doing. He gestures for Burke and Alex to let the other men go. “My office,” he points to Derek and Mark, “ _now_. Try not to trip into each other’s fists on the way.”

Addison levels her glare at Derek before he can say anything – defending her or no, this is _her_ fight he stepped into – and he walks away silently instead, wiping away the blood from his brow.

“You okay?” Alex asks quietly before following Burke down the hallway.

“Yeah,” she lies.

He gives her a look but walks past, surreptitiously brushing his fingers against hers. Five steps of a jog and he’s caught up with Burke, a silent agreement between them to follow a little behind the other two so they can break them up again if necessary.

Addison stares at bright red droplets on the white tile floor as a janitor starts the biohazard cleanup protocol. A mop sweeps into her vision, washing the blood away, and she blinks herself back to focus on Richard standing beside her.

“Addie?”

“What? Sorry,” she shakes her head.

“I asked if you were okay.”

She inhales sharply. “Yeah,” she looks past her mentor and out the window to the rain. “I’m okay.” At his concerned look, she smiles. “If I let everything Mark Sloan does about this bother me, it’s going to be a long nine months.” Five, now. Followed by eighteen years. “I’m fine, Richard. Go yell.”

He smiles kindly and sets his hand on her shoulder. With a gentle squeeze, he nods and leaves her alone in the hallway with the cleanup crew.

She shakes her head. Her strawberries are still waiting in her fridge and she walks off to find the coffee cart. Derek and Mark have had this fight coming for years. She just never expected to actually witness it.

***

“This is more of a mess than I thought it would be,” Addison says to the ceiling. Her strawberries are long gone and her tea’s down to melting ice cubes. She pokes at the ice with her straw and stretches out on her couch.

Miranda lets out a short laugh from her spot in Addison’s desk chair. “You thought having your ex-husband’s baby _wasn’t_ going to be a mess?”

From the other end of the couch, Callie chokes on her smoothie. She covers it well, but not so well that Addison doesn’t notice. She pushes her foot against Callie's leg, an approximation of a kick.

“I said _more of a mess_. Implying a baseline and predictable level of mess.”

Miranda blinks right past that. “So, what are you going to do about it?”

“I was kind of hoping that if I ignored it long enough, it would just go away,” Addison grimaces. “The mess,” she clarifies, “not the baby.”

“That’s a _terrible_ plan,” Callie says, “even for you.”

Addison scoffs. “It’s a _great_ plan. Oh,” she realizes she hasn’t told her friends yet and it’s an important piece of the more-of-a-mess puzzle. “I’m dating Alex.”

Callie slowly sits up straight and turns to look at her friend. “ _Karev_?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” Callie says, slowly breaking the two syllables out with a skeptical tone at the same time as Miranda says, “Finally.”

Addison sits up halfway to make a face at Callie, but then, registering what Miranda said, rapidly turns to look at her instead. “Wait, what?”

“You two have been making eyes at each other for a year. It’s about time you finally did something about it.”

“I do not – I do not _make eyes_ at Alex Karev.” She does _now_ , but that’s so not the point.

Miranda just stares at her. Addison flops back down onto the pillows.

“Far be it for me to comment on your personal life,” Callie says with a tone that indicates the exact opposite, “but doesn’t that make things _more_ of a mess?”

“Yep. But, strangely, I don’t care. I might eventually, but right now I really don’t.” Alex is blissfully uncomplicated. He likes pizza and bad movies and he holds her hand when they walk back to the car and he doesn’t seem at all freaked out by the extreme left turn her life took four months ago.

He's new and he's nice and he cares and they're at the point where how she feels about him should scare the crap out of her. But it doesn't. She keeps waiting for the panic to crash over her and it hasn't. She wonders if maybe that's the difference she's been trying to pinpoint for two months: things are right, _he's_ right, and so there's no reason for panic.

Callie sets her hand on Addison’s knee. “Are you happy?”

Silence hangs in the room while she considers it. Normally, she’d jump and say _yes_ without thinking. But the little life growing inside of her has thrown everything into stark perspective, so she thinks about it for a moment before giving her friends the answer they’re hoping to hear.

Mark’s a problem right now, though he’ll get over it eventually; he’s a master at getting over things, at getting over _her_. Being friends with, but not actually _being with_ , the baby’s father feels strange. Alex and Meredith are a whole additional layer of complication in their own ways. And she’s terrified: as many children as she’s helped into the world, they’ve never been _hers_ before.

But she’s excited for the little bundle of cells dividing and growing inside of her, excited for her kid. And she's excited about Alex and whatever lies in the future for them. And those two things alone eclipse everything else.

“Yeah,” she says. “I am.”

***

Slowly but surely, Addison acquires furniture. She starts with a sofa, then a kitchen table and chairs, then a loveseat to match the sofa, then a desk. She starts her fifth month with a fully furnished three-bedroom condo and she pays professionals to turn the off-white walls into tasteful pops of color.

Baby furniture, however, is another story.

Addison tries to ignore Callie sitting on her office couch as her friend stares at her. She has a hunch as to what Callie wants, and she _hates_ furniture shopping, so she blocks her out while she types up patient notes. Twenty minutes pass and she reaches the end of a chart, and the end of her patience. “Yes?”

“Do you have a crib yet?”

She sighs. “No.”

“Changing table? Dresser? Chair? Lights?”

“No, no, no, and…yes, actually.” She has heartburn and aimlessly scrolling Amazon while waiting for it to settle down to thank for the lights. They have little fluffy clouds on the lampshades and came with a matching rainbow nightlight.

“And Baby is due when?”

“Four months,” Addison answers. That’s plenty of time to collect everything she needs. That she’s going to hate furniture shopping even more when she’s in her third trimester, even if she does it all from her phone, is a fact she’s vehemently ignoring.

“Addison.”

“Hey, I have a kitchen table now.”

Callie stands up and crosses Addison’s small office to stand in front of her. “Which is great, ‘cause I’m tired of always sitting on the couch to eat when I’m over there, but your kid can’t sleep on it.”

“I’ll go this weekend,” Addison says, repeating the same promise she’s made to herself for the last three weeks. “I have work to do,” she gestures to the stack of patient charts next to her computer.

Callie narrows her eyes. “Save.”

“What?”

“Save your work.”

She does.

Callie pushes Addison's laptop closed and unplugs the power cable. It drops through the cable hole in the desk and falls to the floor, lost in the mess of cords underneath her desk.

“Still has a battery.”

“Mmm, nope,” Callie shakes her head. “Alex took it out last night. Come on,” she gestures for Addison to stand up. “Let’s go.”

“I knew he was plotting,” Addison mutters. She’d thought her bag felt lighter this morning. He must’ve taken it out when she had to take a phone call after dinner. “Callie,” she protests.

She holds up a hand. “Ah, no. I checked, you don’t have anything scheduled this afternoon. You’ve already rounded on your patients and everyone's stable.”

Addison raises an eyebrow. “When did you become an obstetrician?”

“I asked Izzie. Those,” she points at the charts, “can wait and you literally have nothing else to do this afternoon. I know you hate furniture shopping, but let’s go – I promise, we’ll get it all done in four hours.”

With a sigh, Addison stands. “Fine. But I’m holding you to those four hours.”

***

Addison presses her lips together, trying to stifle a smile as Callie sits on the floor of the nursery, stymied by a drawer. “I think that’s upside down,” she says.

Callie looks at it, then down at the instructions, then back at the drawer. “No,” she sighs, “it’s _definitely_ upside down.” She picks up the screwdriver to undo the last fifteen minutes of work. “How’d you get the crib done so fast?”

The smile breaks through. “I followed the instructions.”

Laughing, Callie crumples up a tiny plastic bag that once held screws and throws it at Addison, missing by a mile. She makes a face as she gently pries off the rails to flip them the other way. “I think I’ll stick to bones, professionally.”

“Your four hours are more than up, if you want them to be,” Addison says. “You can leave it and I’ll put it together this weekend. I promise.” She makes a little cross over her heart.

Callie looks up sharply. “No. It’s a matter of pride.”

The look on her friend’s face is priceless and Addison does her very best not to laugh. “Okay, but it’s 7:30, so I’m ordering pizza.” She pushes herself out of the chair. “Double pepperoni?”

“Perfect,” Callie says, all the component parts to the drawers now lying in front of her again.

Before Addison can dial, her phone buzzes with a text message.

_AK: Sloan’s actually letting me out of here in half an hour. Want company?_

She smiles. While there have been plenty of dates and kisses and hugs, and he’s been over quite a bit in the last two months, he hasn’t spent the night and they haven’t had sex yet. It’s been nice, going slowly for a change, especially when other things are happening very, very fast.

 _AM: Sure_. _But you’ll have to share for a bit – Callie’s failing at putting drawers together and is considering it a blow to her pride if she leaves without finishing._

 _AM: There will be pizza though_.

She orders pizza, gets an extra-large so she can have leftovers, and orders a bottle of Diet Coke for Callie and Mountain Dew for Alex. “Forty-five minutes,” she shouts down the hallway to Callie.

 _AK: lol_ , _I put your tv cabinet together, I feel her pain. See you in an hour._

“Hey,” she leans on the doorframe. Callie has one of the drawers put back together and it looks the right way up this time. “Mark’s letting Alex leave tonight, so he’s going to come over when his shift’s done.”

Callie looks up with a wide grin. “Need me to leave?” She waggles her eyebrows.

Addison gives her a look. “I thought your pride was on the line.”

“My pride can go screw itself if you want to get laid.” She lines the drawer up with the rails in the bottom of the dresser and it slides in perfectly. “A _ha_!”

“Congrats.” She watches silently as Callie puts another drawer together. “We haven’t, you know. Yet.”

Callie pushes her hair out of her eyes. “Seriously? Hasn’t it been, like, two months?”

“More or less.”

Callie tilts her head. A look of realization crosses her face. “You really like him, don’t you?”

Nodding, Addison breathes in. “Yeah,” she exhales slowly, “I really do.”

“Well, how about I finish putting this together, stick around long enough to eat two pieces of pizza, and then leave. My pride stays intact, and you can get laid if you want.”

Addison laughs. “Everybody wins.”

***

Alex sticks his head out of the kitchen, beer in hand. “Do you mind?”

Addison shakes her head and leans back against the couch, resting her feet on the coffee table. She crosses one ankle over the other. “I'm not drinking it," she gestures to her stomach. "I keep it here for you.”

He stills at that and gives her a look she can’t read.

“Oh, please don’t panic because I’m keeping the kind of beer you like. It’s not like I gave you keys or a drawer.”

He laughs and pops back into the kitchen to open the beer, then joins her on the couch. “I’m not panicking because you keep beer around for me.”

“Then why –”

“I’m not panicking at all,” he says slowly, deliberately. “Never had a girl intentionally keep my kind of beer in her fridge,” he takes a sip. “That’s all.”

She leans in and kisses him. “You’re welcome,” she says quietly before sitting back.

Alex settles his arm over her shoulders and tugs her close. She sighs contently and rests her head on his strong chest. Feeling his lips brush the top of her head, she smiles. The only thing about them that hasn’t been going slowly is the rate at which her feelings for him grow.

She picks up the remote and turns on her TV and DVR. “I have last week’s SNL, Bake Off, and about twenty hours of Jeopardy.” She also has several runs of Masterpiece Theater and Mystery she’s caught on reruns. She's told herself she's saving them for maternity leave, but she knows she'll never get around to any of it.

“Bake Off,” Alex says, with a lot more excitement than Addison thought he’d have for a cute British baking show.

She looks at him. “Seriously?”

He makes a face and, if Addison isn’t mistaken, a slight blush dusts his cheeks. “Yeah. Izzie got the whole house hooked on it. I’ve been stuck at the hospital and haven’t seen this week’s episode.”

“In that case.” Addison selects the episode. Before she hits play, she turns to him. “Is Mark still giving you a hard time?”

“I can handle him.”

“Not what I asked, Alex.”

He takes another swig of beer. “He’s…Sloan." There's a thousand words unsaid in his voice. "And then he found out we were dating.”

That piece of information came into public knowledge a few weeks after the fight. She's grateful it didn't come out before: she doesn't want to imagine what that fight would've looked like if Mark had known about Alex at the time. Thankfully, there isn't much plastics/obstetrics overlap and he's easy for her to avoid. Alex still has to deal with him, though. “I won't say anything unless you ask me to,” she says, “but I’m sorry you have to put up with his bullshit.”

He kisses her forehead. “I’m sorry you have to put up with it, too.”

“Thanks.” It bothers her, more than she wants to admit, that Mark’s giving all of them the cold (and occasionally flat-out _rude_ ) shoulder. But forcing the issue won’t help, especially if it comes from her. Derek may be the one he punched, and he may have absolutely no ground to stand on about it, but she's the one he's angry with. Alex gives her a little squeeze, as if he senses where her thoughts are headed, and she curls up into him, willing thoughts of Mark Sloan out of her head for the night. She laces her fingers with his and turns on the show.

When the episode’s over, Addison turns off the TV and covers a large yawn.

Alex looks at his watch and his eyes widen at how late it is. “I should get going,” he says reluctantly.

“Or you could stay,” she says softly, sitting up. “I’m not, I’m not asking you to stay over for sex,” she continues, pushing her hair out of her face. Sex is _definitely_ in their near future, just not tonight. “I’m just,” she looks at him, “saying you could spend the night if you want.”

He smiles and it tugs at something warm in her chest. “Sure.”

While he puts away the rest of the pizza and loads up the dishwasher, she finds him an extra toothbrush and a towel. Her pajamas lately have been of the underwear-and-sports-bra variety, but she goes for shorts and a tank top tonight; if she gets hot, she’ll just kick the covers around. Makeup washed off and teeth brushed, she leaves the bathroom to let Alex have his turn.

“Green towel’s yours,” she says and pads barefoot over the hardwood to her bedroom. She lets out a slow exhale as she pulls the covers back. It’s been a long time since she’s slept with someone new; her nerves are a little twitchy.

Alex comes in while she’s taking her prenatal vitamins. They’re large, so she has to take them one at a time, and she waits until she’s finished before she turns around.

He’s in his boxers and undershirt and it’s all she can do to not lose her balance. The black undershirt is tight enough to reveal every outline of every muscle in his chest and stomach. She's seen his arms before, even pretty sure she’s seen him in an undershirt – maybe even shirtless – before but seeing the whole package in her bedroom is _striking_. She swallows.

Luckily, he doesn’t seem to notice.

Addison recovers quickly and steps up to the left side of the bed. It's a conscious decision: the right side was hers with both Derek and Mark. “I’ve been a furnace lately,” she warns.

He follows her lead and climbs into bed. “Hey, I’m getting to sleep with _you_. I think I’ll live.”

She laughs quietly, nerves officially gone. “Thanks, Alex.”

Alex shrugs an innocent little shrug and then looks at her with an expression decidedly _not_ innocent. Addison realizes he _had_ noticed her looking earlier. Now he’s returning the favor. His eyes slowly drag down her body, from her eyes to her breasts, to the slight curve of her stomach, to her hips, to her bare legs, and slowly back up again. He smirks.

She bites her lower lip and inhales sharply. Not tonight, but soon. _Definitely_ soon.

He leans in and kisses her. She gasps and lets him tug her closer, opening her mouth when he sweeps his tongue across her lips. It’s an enormous effort not to straddle his waist and tug his shirt off, especially when Alex tangles both hands in her hair, cupping the back of her head and pulling her closer. Addison closes her eyes and surrenders to Alex's lips, Alex's hands, _Alex_. They’ve kissed a lot over the past few months, but this one is different – he’s promising _more_. More _everything._

She wraps her arms around his shoulders, letting her fingers explore the muscled panes of his back, and hopes he knows she’s promising more of everything, too.

Alex breaks the kiss, but doesn’t move away, leaving only a few millimeters between their lips. He gently rests his forehead against hers as his hands slide down across her shoulders to her lower back. They’re both breathing a little hard.

Addison sighs quietly, happily. _A girl could get used to this_ , she thinks. She closes the scant distance between them and kisses him softly before pulling away. “Good night, Alex,” she whispers, smiling.

He returns the smile. “Good night, Addison.”

He waits for her to turn off the light and lie down before he does the same. He curls around her, his chest against her back, and rests his arm around her waist.

She lays her hand over his, tangling their fingers together. Addison smiles in the darkness, gently squeezes his hand, and drifts off to sleep.

***

Two days later, Alex finds himself sitting in the hallway outside an exam room next to Meredith.

“This is weird, right?” she says. “This is weird.”

Addison’s pregnancy isn’t nearly the issue for him that it is for Meredith; it’s not even an issue, more of _just there_ , but he admits that it’s still weird. His girlfriend’s in the room behind them with Meredith’s boyfriend while they get a good look at their kid and find out if they’re having a boy or a girl. There’s no way to spin that to make it not a little weird. “Yep.”

She turns her head to look at him. “How are you so okay with all of this?”

He shrugs. “I didn’t date her until after she got knocked up. It’s a little odd, but there isn’t any dark and twisty.”

Meredith sighs and looks forward again. She stretches her legs out in front of her. “You know he’s building a house.”

“By himself?”

She looks at him out of the corner of her eye. “He’s hiring people to do the stuff that might blow up.”

He shrugs again. “Trailer’s a bit small,” he says.

“That’s not the point, Alex. He’s building a _house_. It’s big and permanent and _real_.”

“You gonna freak out and run off?”

“No, I.” She shuts her mouth and frowns. “No.”

“Then it’s just a house,” he says. “It’s a place to live and you’ll have a bigger shower when you stay over.”

A smirk crawls across her lips and Alex braces himself. He knows exactly where she’s going next.

“Speaking of staying over." She looks over at him, smirk turning into a mischievous glint in her eye. "I noticed you didn’t come home the past two nights.”

“Observant of you,” he says, trying to keep his voice flat. He went home at lunch to grab a few changes of clothes but spent the past two nights with Addison. She’s fun to hang around; she’s less reserved than she is at work and has a wicked sharp sense of humor. Plus, she’s a really good kisser.

“Alex,” Meredith scolds, clearly wanting more.

“Nope,” he shakes his head. “You want gossip, go hang around the nurses or talk to Cristina. You’re getting nothing from me.” It’s as much out of respect for Addison – she’s been dragged through enough lately – as it is wanting to keep things private. Part of him wants to shout from the rooftops that he’s sleeping with Addison Montgomery, but the rest of him senses that this is something real, something big and good, and it deserves not to be spread around just yet.

She huffs. “Fine.”

“Hey,” he says after a moment. “It’s just a house, Mer. It’s big and permanent and real, but it’s just a house.”

She sighs and looks up at the ceiling. “Yeah.”

***

Addison quirks an eyebrow at Derek, who’s holding his thumb and index finger apart and staring at the air between them. “What are you doing?”

“Trying to figure out what five inches looks like.”

She reaches over and adjusts his fingers to an approximation of five inches, instead of the three he’d been staring at. “About the size of an avocado. You’re a neurosurgeon who can’t eyeball five inches?” She half-regrets sending him an infographic of fetal growth and development.

“I can eyeball five millimeters,” he says defensively and drops his hand.

Izzie clears her throat. “If you’re ready, Dr. Montgomery.”

Addison nods and pushes her shirt up, revealing her slightly rounded stomach. She takes a deep breath as Izzie places the wand over her lower abdomen. She’s given a thousand people a thousand ultrasounds, but this is _hers_. This is _her_ child on the monitor. Derek’s fingers lace with hers and she looks down at their joined hands. She catches his fingers with hers and gives him a small smile before looking back at the monitor.

Her breath catches in her throat when she hears the familiar sound of a fetal heartbeat. “Holy shit,” she whispers, awestruck. Derek’s thumb brushes across her knuckles and she squeezes his hand in response.

Izzie smiles at the two of them and moves the wand, getting a better picture.

“It’s a girl,” Addison says, unable to tear her eyes away from the monitor. She feels Derek’s other hand on her shoulder, and she reaches up to clasp it. “We’re having a girl,” she whispers.

“We’re having a girl,” he echoes.

***

Alex jumps to his feet when the door opens and Meredith follows suit.

Addison walks out first, then Shepherd, both of them with printouts in their hands.

“Well?” Meredith prompts, when neither parent-to-be immediately starts talking.

“It’s a girl,” Shepherd says, clearly overwhelmed. Meredith smiles and promptly hugs him, her earlier trepidation gone for the moment.

Addison steps toward Alex and he wraps his arm around her waist. “Congratulations,” he whispers, brushing a kiss to her temple.

“Thank you,” she breathes and kisses his cheek. “This is real,” she says.

Alex pulls away from her a little. She looks more overwhelmed and stunned than Shepherd does. It’s an adorable look on her. He smiles and tightens his arm a little. “Yes,” he says, “it is.” He spies the Chief walking past the end of the hallway, and then taking two steps back to turn down the hall to join them. “Heads up,” he says, loud enough for all of them to hear.

“Why is there a gathering of my surgeons in this hallway?” Despite the look on his face, the one that says he thinks they really ought to be somewhere else, his voice is kind.

Addison shakes herself out of her stunned fog and holds up the ultrasound. “It’s a girl,” she says.

“Oh,” he breaks into a smile, “in that case.” He shakes Shepherd’s hand, and Alex steps back so he can give Addison a hug.

***

“My kid has fingerprints,” Addison says. She bites the inside of her cheek and stares at the ultrasound. “God, I deal with crazy things all day long, I see babies all the time, and I can’t get over the fact that my daughter has fingerprints.”

Alex kisses the top of her head and then comes around the front of the couch. He lifts up her legs, sits down, and then lets her feet rest on his lap. “It’s never been your kid with fingerprints before,” he points out.

She looks up at him over the rim of her glasses. “Is this weird for you? This has to be weird for you.” She’s been waiting for him to say something for three months. He hasn’t and it’s starting to freak her out a little, like he might suddenly wake up and realize that this whole situation is far beyond his weirdness quota.

He shrugs. “It’s not normal,” he admits.

She snorts, a rough sound in the back of her throat. “No kidding. But seriously, Alex. Are you okay with this? I mean, she’s coming in four months and Derek’s not going to disappear.”

He gently squeezes her ankle. “Wouldn’t have asked you out if I wasn’t okay with it.”

With a deep breath, she opens her mouth. But he shakes his head, silencing her. It’s a good thing – she didn’t know what she was going to say anyway.

“Look,” he says, sitting up a little straighter, “I like you. A _lot_. And, yeah, it’s a little weird you’re having a kid with your ex, but it’s not make-me-walk-out weird. Okay?”

She gives him a little nod. “Okay.”

He holds her gaze in silence for a few moments.

“Freak out over?” He grins.

She scrunches up her nose. “I was not freaking out.”

His grin widens. “You totally were.”

“Was not.” Laughing, she grabs the blanket from the back of the couch and throws it at him, covering his head.

Alex laughs and pulls the blanket away. There’s a mischievous glint in his eyes and then Addison suddenly finds herself tugged to the other end of the couch, Alex’s arms around her.

“Yes,” she says. “Freak out over. Thank you.”

He kisses her temple. “You’re welcome.”

"And," she says after a few moments, "for the record: I like you a lot too."

***

Once the elevator empties, it’s just him and Addison.

“So, I was thinking,” she starts.

Derek can’t help himself. “That’s always dangerous.” She makes a face at him and lightly smacks his arm with the folder she’s carrying. He laughs. “What, just because you’re pregnant means I can’t mock you?”

She ignores that. “Anyway. I was thinking about hyphenating her name.”

“I like that idea.” But there’s something else, something in the way she’s carrying herself that tells him it wasn’t just an obvious last name choice that she wants to talk to him about. “What’s up, Addison?”

She smiles softly and gently bites her lower lip. “She started kicking last night.”

His eyes light up. “Really?” He has copies of the ultrasound on the fridge and taped to his locker, proof that this tiny little human is his and very real, but the idea that his daughter is actually moving is mind-boggling.

Addison nods. “Feels a little weird, but yeah.” Making a face, she looks down at her stomach. “Of course, she’s not doing it right now when her dad could feel it.”

 _Dad._ It's the first time he's heard it out loud. It feels strange. And right. And a little overwhelming. “Some other time.”

“Yeah.” Addison pauses and then pulls the emergency stop.

He looks at her quizzically.

“I’ve also been thinking about godparents,” she says.

He grimaces. He’s thought of that, too. “Yeah.” By all rights, Mark should be their daughter’s godfather. “I don’t know what to do about that.”

Exhaling, Addison shakes her head. “Me neither. I mean, he’s calmed down and he’s even been less of a jerk to Alex. But given everything, I don’t know that he’s the right choice. But he _should_ be, you know?”

Derek thinks that a lot of this could’ve been resolved if Addison just hadn’t slept with Mark, but he doesn’t say so. If she hadn’t slept with Mark, they probably wouldn’t be having this child right now. “I think he’s less pissed at me. I’ll talk to him.”

Addison nods and then her eyes suddenly open wide. “Oh!” She grabs his hand and puts it on her stomach.

There’s a faint fluttering beneath his palm. Nothing big or strong, he can hardly even feel the tiny kicks, but they’re _there_. And just as suddenly, they’re gone. “Wow,” he says. Realizing his hand’s still resting on her stomach, he pulls away. “Wow,” he repeats quietly, to himself. “What’s that feel like?”

Addison pushes the emergency stop and the elevator begins to rise again. She presses her lips together, thinking. “Kind of like I’m a bag of microwave popcorn.”

They hit the sixth floor and the elevator dings. “Really?”

She shrugs as the doors open. “Close enough.” She follows him out of the elevator. “You’ll talk to…”

He nods. “I’ll talk to the guy about the thing. Have a good surgery.”

“You too,” she calls after him and heads in the opposite direction.


	4. threw out our cloaks and our daggers because it's morning now

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> godfathers and apologies and declarations of love

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Daylight," Taylor Swift

Derek knocks on the door to Mark’s office. “Got a minute?”

It’s clear from the expression on Mark’s face that he’d rather give that minute to anybody else, but he nods. “Yeah.”

Derek shuts the door behind him and sits in one of the two chairs in front of the desk. Mark’s office is too small for a couch and Derek thinks it’s probably for the best that he doesn’t have any traditionally flat surfaces to lie on. “Addison and I were talking, about the godfather.”

“I assume not the movie.”

“No, not the movie. For the baby.” He pauses. “For our daughter.”

There’s a twinkle of excitement in Mark’s blue eyes, but then it’s gone. Derek swallows: Mark is trying very hard to pretend he doesn’t care.

He just comes right out and says it. “It should rightfully be you. You were our best friend.”

“But now, not so much,” Mark leans back in his chair. The beginnings of a glower start to form in his brow.

Derek sighs. “You’ve not been a shining beacon of friendship, no.”

“That’s not entirely my fault.”

He’s not entirely wrong, but Derek doesn’t say so. “Do you even want the job?”

Mark opens his mouth, presumably to flatly decline, but he closes it again and pauses. He looks to the side, thinking.

Derek spends the time cataloging the sheer number of plants Mark has acquired since the last time he was in here, before…everything. He counts ten, mostly crowded by the tiny window behind his desk. Shockingly, they’re all alive and looking healthy. He remembers a dead cactus one semester in med school, though he can’t remember whose fault that was. Even Addison couldn’t revive it.

“Yeah,” Mark says after a good long while. “If you’re offering, I do.”

“I’d offer it right now, if it were entirely up to me,” Derek says. “But it's not. Addison gets a vote too and she’s pretty pissed at you.”

Mark folds his arms over his chest and the glower returns. “She ran to her ex-husband and then started banging my resident.”

“Because you cheated on her. And, from what I understand, it wasn't the first time.”

Sighing, Mark deflates. All the anger rushes out of his posture and he just looks tired. Derek hasn’t spent a lot of time the last five months wondering how his friend is doing. He thinks he maybe should have.

“Yeah, I don’t really have the moral high ground here, do I.”

“No,” Derek shakes his head. “Nope. Not at all. Not in the least.”

“A simple ‘no’ would’ve sufficed.”

Derek gives him a lopsided grin. “If you really want the job, talk to Addison. She's the one who brought it up; I'm reasonably certain she's not gonna poison your coffee.” He stands to leave.

“Alright,” Mark says with a tone that makes Derek wonder if he'll actually follow through with it. “Oh hey,” he calls before Derek’s at the door. “Congratulations.”

Derek smiles. “Thank you.”

***

Alex smiles, feeling her eyelashes brush against his neck with each slow blink. Suddenly, her arms tighten around him. He pulls away a little, looking at her in concern. “You okay?”

Addison slowly shakes her head. She folds her hands on his chest and rests her chin on her fingers. “My blood sugar’s too low, so I nearly passed out in the middle of surgery today. I was really planning on having sex tonight, but the vertigo hasn’t really gone away, so that now sounds like a bad idea.”

“Plus,” he gestures. They’re in his room at Grey’s house. She’d called when she got out of surgery, but he was already three shots in with Meredith, so instead Addison came over. He’s certainly had sex in this room and this bed before, but they have a silent agreement to not do anything that can’t be done fully clothed here. Between roommates and one night stands, the house is a revolving door of hospital staff, and not all of them are good at discretion. None of them, frankly.

She laughs. “Yeah, that too.”

He brushes a stray lock of red hair out of her eyes. “What else?” That list isn’t nearly long enough to dull her sparkling blue eyes this much.

She slowly breathes out and rolls off of him, clasping her hands over her stomach as she lies on her back and stares up at the ceiling. He follows her, rolling onto his side and propping his head up on his hand. He watches as her eyes follow the crack in the ceiling from the wall behind them to the door. Though they haven’t been dating that long, he’s learned pretty quickly how to read her. But the look on her face right now is strange – uncertainty, worry, and something else. He reaches out and gently brushes away a lock of hair that wasn’t really in her face; he stays quiet, letting her talk on her own terms.

“I had to deliver a stillborn,” she says quietly, after a long while of silence. She swallows.

Alex drops his free hand down to hers, lightly grasping her fingers.

“It wasn’t the first time. Obviously. And, I mean, it's always awful,” she says, still looking up at the ceiling and the crack. “It’s not like I’d never done it before – it happens. But I’d,” she pauses, and draws her lower lip between her teeth. She takes a short breath. “I had to tell this woman that her baby was dead, and deliver it for her, all while being obviously pregnant myself. It felt, it always feels terrible telling people that, but this time it felt…it felt worse.”

She blinks and a tear falls to her cheek. She’s quick to wipe it away, but not so quick that he doesn’t see.

“Addison.”

“I’m fine, Alex,” she wipes another tear away.

“Didn’t say you weren’t.”

She nods and takes a shaky breath. “I think I’m going to cry now,” she breathes.

“Okay.” Alex shifts, giving her space to curl into him if she wants. After a few moments, she turns onto her side toward him. He slides his arm around her waist, settling his palm on the small of her back; she scoots closer, tucking her head under his chin, and starts to cry.

He holds her close, but not too tight, and rubs her back as she cries. He can’t begin to understand what’s going on her mind, so he doesn’t try, doesn’t say anything – just holds her. Her shoulders shake and he presses a kiss to the top of her head and whispers a gentle reminder to breathe.

With a sniffle, she nods, acknowledging that she’s heard him, and clutches his shirt in her fingertips. Slowly, her breathing returns to normal and her shoulders stop shaking. “Thanks,” she says in a hoarse whisper.

He nods and kisses her forehead before loosening his arm enough that she can slide out. She rolls onto her back again and wipes her fingers under her eyes. When she looks at her fingers, she laughs a little – they’re black with eyeliner and mascara.

“Nice,” she whispers to herself and tries to do damage control on her makeup.

Alex stays silent while she puts herself back together, literally and metaphorically. He’s not sure if now is the time for it, but he also thinks that if he waits for what feels like the perfect time, he might be waiting a while. “I love you,” he says.

He can’t put words to it, though it wasn’t for lack of trying; a new, different feeling has been rising up inside of him lately; that feeling only gets stronger when he’s around her. He tried to describe it, because it was new and different and he’s not used to feeling new and different things, but it hit him in the shower a week ago: love. He loves her. It’s a little scary – a lot scary – because he’s spent his life up until now pointedly _not_ loving anyone, and in fact running very far in the other direction the minute anything that seemed like love might possibly crop up. Yet here he is. In love with someone. And he’s in the kind of love that tells him this is it. That she’s it. She’s the one.

Addison slowly turns her head to look at him, resting her cheek on the pillow. She blinks.

This expression he can read. Hope and happiness and excitement, with a dash of shock and relief, and a healthy dose of speechlessness. He smiles at her, trying to keep the relief out of his own eyes.

“I know that a lot in your life right now is pretty crazy, and the crazy is all happening really fast, so don’t worry about saying it back. I just – I wanted you to know that I love you. And I’m in this,” he gestures between them.

A smile slowly creeps across her face and she leans in. “I’m in this, too,” she whispers against his lips and then kisses him.

Grinning, he wraps his arms around her and tugs her to him. She giggles, an honest-to-god giggle, and slides over him, straddling his waist. She breaks the kiss and pulls away a little. Her hair falls, curtaining around them. He reaches up, tucking it behind her ear. Her skin is soft under his fingers and he brushes his thumb across her cheek. She kisses his palm and rests her hands on his chest.

“I know you said not to worry about it,” she says, ducking her head to kiss him again, “but for the record – I love you, too.”

***

Addison stops dead still in her office doorway. She’s exhausted and her feet hurt like hell, even in comfortable sneakers, but Mark’s in her office, leaning against her desk.

“Hi,” she says warily and steps inside, shutting the door behind her. Derek said he’d talked to Mark, but that was three weeks ago.

Mark looks up from staring at his shoes. He looks nervous. “I owe you an apology,” he says simply.

She bites the inside of her cheek and stands beside the couch. She wants nothing more than to sit down, but she feels like she should stay standing. Keep the higher ground.

He gestures at the small white box with a gold bow sitting on the low table.

She looks down at the box and then back up at him. “You brought cake?”

Mark shrugs. “I’m in pretty deep. Everything’ll help.”

“Yeah,” she says quietly. “You are.” Her anger has been sidelined for months in favor of other, more positive, feelings, but it’s sat there the whole time, simmering beneath the surface. Now that Mark’s standing in front of her, the anger threatens to burst up and out of her; she wants so badly to scream at him and release the fight she denied herself by leaving a note. She cared about him, trusted him, gave him more chances than he ever deserved. All he did in return was treat her like she was disposable. The dagger may be long gone and the wound long healed, but there’s still a scar that aches in the cold. She clenches her jaw and doesn’t say anything.

His eyes cast downward again for a moment. She carefully schools her face blank, giving nothing away.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “For everything,” he says, “but especially being a jerk about this,” he gestures at her stomach, now plainly obvious. “You, uhm,” he scuffs his shoe against the carpet and stares at the floor again, “deserve better than that.”

Addison nods, slowly, but she’s not letting him off the hook that easily. A blanket apology for everything isn’t enough. She doesn’t say anything.

He looks up once more. “And I’m sorry for cheating on you. That was,” he shakes his head, “I’m sorry. You deserve better than that, too.”

 _I’ve found better than that_ , she thinks.

Mark takes a deep breath and looks up at the ceiling. “And I’m sorry for being mad at you and taking it out on your boyfriend.”

Addison studies him for a moment. Mark looks at everything in the room but her and his hands grip her desk tight enough to turn his knuckles white. She may have loved him once, but she doesn’t anymore. And keeping the anger at a simmer, constantly monitoring it so it doesn't boil over, is exhausting. She wants to turn the heat off. She wants her friend back.

“Are you going to stop walking the other way when you see me in the hallway?”

“Yes.”

“And are you going to stop taking this out on Alex?”

“Yes.”

“And are you going to stop walking around like you’re the only hurt party in all of this?”

“Yes.”

Addison takes a shaky breath in. “And will you stop being pissed at my kid?”

Finally, he looks at her. “I was never,” he stops suddenly when she narrows her eyes. “Yes.”

She swallows and gives him a small smile. “Then we’re good.”

He blinks. “Just like that?”

“Yeah,” she nods and sits down on the couch. The fight's over; she doesn’t need to hold the high ground anymore. Another time and she might still be angry, the apology might not be enough, but she has too much on her emotional plate right now to keep _being angry at Mark_ on it.

She flicks her eyes up at him, still standing by her desk. “You want to sit?”

He does.

She picks up the box and carefully opens it. It’s an icing-laden piece of vanilla layer cake, with what looks like raspberry in between the layers. Either he made a lucky guess, or he remembered that raspberry is her favorite. “Thanks for the cake,” she says, picking up the plastic fork that came with it.

Before she takes a bite, she pauses and looks at Mark sitting uncomfortably in the chair across from her. “I know that Derek talked to you,” she starts, “and if you want it, we’d love for you to be her godfather.”

“Even with all that history and mess?” He sounds incredulous.

She nods. He's still their friend and, at his core, a good person. Pretty flawed, but a good person nonetheless. “Even with all that history and mess.”

He smiles widely. “I’d love to.”

***

The solid frame frightens Meredith a little each time she drives up to the trailer. It’s only a frame still, but contractors are coming on Monday to start bricking the outside and the electrician starts work on Tuesday. Derek is building a house.

She tries to keep Alex’s words in mind. It’s just a house. But it’s more than a house. It’s a reality. With each day that she comes out here and discovers another wall finished, the false hope that she’ll wake up in a few hours and Derek won’t be having a baby with his ex-wife gets a little smaller. The house becomes more real, the baby becomes more real, and, if she’s being honest with herself, the idea that she’s going to live with Derek inside that house for a very long time becomes more real.

She loves him and wants to spend the rest of her life with him, of that she’s absolutely sure, but it’s still scary. The baby is weird and will never not be weird, but she's made her peace with it. It’s the house that’s freaking her out.

“It’s not a metaphor,” she reminds herself as she shuts off her car. “It’s just a house.” She looks at it, all empty angles in the moonlight, and spies a small light coming from one of the upstairs bedrooms.

Meredith gets out of her car, zips up her jacket, shoves her hands in her pockets, and walks toward the unfinished house.

“What are you doing?” she asks, standing in the doorway to the bedroom.

Derek folds down the corner of the page and looks up at her. She closes her eyes against the bright light.

"Sorry," he apologizes and puts the headlight on the floor beside him. “Baby names,” he says.

Meredith nods and sits down beside him. She shivers. “Have you guys come up with anything?”

“Not yet,” he says. He reaches his arm around her and tugs her close.

She leans her head on his shoulder. It’s freezing up here, but at least he’s warm.

He kisses her forehead. “I’m not just building this for her, you know. It’s also for us.”

“I know,” she says and snuggles closer. Somehow, him building the house for them makes it simultaneously less and more scary. “Is it gonna be done in time?”

“Yes,” he says confidently. “We might be sleeping on an air mattress, but everything will be done before she gets here.”

“Lights and heat and everything?” It's coming along nicely, but she has her doubts.

“Running water, too.”

***

Addison stills when Alex’s fingers brush the bare skin at her hips, just above her jeans.

Alex breaks the kiss and looks up at her. “You okay?”

She grins and tucks her hair behind her ear. “Yeah. I was just thinking – if you wanted, we could move this off the couch, and into the bedroom.”

A grin of his own takes over his face as he realizes what she’s suggesting. “Hell yeah.”


	5. such an almighty sound

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> an important question. and the naming of things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Drumming Song," Florence + the Machine

Derek hands her the smoothie she'd asked for. "Have you told your family?"

Addison grimaces. "No." She should. She really should. Soon. Tomorrow. She takes a sip - strawberry orange, her favorite. "Have you?"

He shakes his head. "We should do that."

"Yeah," she hesitates, for more than just the brain freeze she gives herself by drinking too fast. She follows Derek into the lounge and drops onto the couch. Two and a half months to go and it cannot come soon enough.

Derek turns to her. "You're scared of your mother."

"I really am."

He leans against the table. "How bad can it be?"

She stares at him. "You've met Bizzy."

He holds up his hands. "Fair point."

Silence settles between them.

"How's Amelia?" Addison asks after a moment.

"Sober. I think."

"Good. Good for her."

"Yeah," Derek agrees.

"Yeah," she echoes softly.

Silence falls again, twenty years of history hanging between them.

"Anyway," Derek says, "we should…"

"I'll call my mother if you call yours."

"Deal."

***

Addison watches one of the new interns walk through the living room and straight into the kitchen. “How many people live in this house?” Alex was already three shots in with Meredith when she got off surgery, so she came over. She’s seen half of Alex’s fellow surgery residents, Callie, and a handful of interns in the past hour. There’s even a label maker in the kitchen.

“It’s unclear.” Meredith slams back another shot. “Come on,” she hands Alex the bottle. “Your turn.”

It’s moments like this she realizes how much older than Alex she is. It doesn’t bother her, but she also doesn’t miss these days. The benefits of a good mattress and waking up not hungover are greater than she ever thought during her residency.

Alex pours himself another shot to keep up with Meredith. Addison watches him slam the shot back straight, no salt, no lime. She raises an eyebrow.

Izzie drops onto the couch beside her and grabs the bottle before Alex can pass it back to Meredith. “Isn’t it boring watching other people drink?”

“Desperately. I miss wine,” she sighs wistfully. “Okay,” she says when Izzie takes a drink straight from the bottle. “What _happened_ today?”

“College dorm,” Alex says, wiping a stray drop of tequila from his lips. “Fireworks. Inside.”

Addison grimaces, as much about the straight tequila as the fireworks. "That beats my day."

"What was your day?" Meredith asks.

They've become closer friends since the fight. Meredith even asks her about the baby sometimes, though she could get the answers from Derek. Addison has hope. "I got slapped from across the country through the phone by my mother, who's never approved of any of my life choices and is apparently not about to start now."

Meredith gestures a question with the tequila bottle toward Addison's stomach.

"Among other things. She really doesn't like you," she says to Alex. She hadn't intended to say anything about him today, but Bizzy was in rare form and Addison decided it was best to get it all out at once. If she has her way about it, Alex and her family will only rarely cross paths, if ever. None of them is invited into her personal life anymore.

Alex shrugs. "I have that effect on people."

Izzie abruptly stands up and walks out of the room into the kitchen.

"Was it something I said?" Alex calls after her.

"Shut _up_!" Izzie says, a disembodied voice from the kitchen. She comes back a moment later, an empty wine glass and a bottle of club soda in the other. "This," she says, gesturing to Addison and her glass of ice water, "is sad." She flops back down onto the couch and fills the wine glass to the top with club soda. "Here."

Addison takes the glass. "Thanks?" She takes a sip. It's definitely not wine, but strangely it still makes her feel better.

"You guys have a name yet?" Izzie asks.

She takes bigger drink. "Nope."

"Kinda running out of time, aren't you?" Meredith says, cutting up a new lime.

Addison isn't sure whether she's impressed or concerned that there's a whole bowl of limes and a box of salt on the table. She shrugs in response to Meredith's question. "That house doesn't have electricity yet," she points out, dodging the question. Two months is plenty of time for a name. Plenty.

"Yeah, but yours does," Meredith says. "Kid needs a name."

"Got any suggestions?"

"Not Ellis," Meredith says, pouring another shot.

Addison's eyebrows raise a little. "Not the only one with Mommy Issues today then, huh."

"Nope." The word pops on her lips and she slams the shot, salt-tequila-lime.

Addison grimaces. "Might want to slow down, there."

"Eh, she'll hit seven and pass out pretty quick," Alex says.

Within an hour and a half, Meredith hits her limit and, true to Alex's words, passes out cold on the floor. Alex and Izzie stand up to help get her upstairs. Alex comes back down, leaving Izzie to handle Meredith. He sits next to Addison.

"Crazy house you live in here," she observes.

"Yeah," he laughs. "It can get that way."

She turns to him, drawing one leg up on the couch. "I'm not. I'm not saying this because of the crazy." She twirls the stem of her glass between her fingers. "But do you want to move in with me?" He starts to answer but she holds up a hand. "Don't answer that right now, you're a little drunk and I think sober Alex should think about it for a minute before - _oh_!" Suddenly Alex's lips are on hers and he's kissing her, slowly and deeply. Addison moans softly as his hands tangle in her hair.

Alex pulls away just a breadth. "I'll tell you again in the morning, but answer's the same both ways. I love you," he kisses her again, softer this time. "Hell yes I'll move in with you."

Addison smiles and settles against his chest.

***

"By the way," Derek says, catching up to her in the hallway, "the house does have electricity."

She stops in the middle of the hall. She'd been reading a chart and got distracted. "What?"

"The house. On the property. It has electricity."

Addison blinks. "Good for you." She starts walking again.

"I was thinking," he pauses while a group of doctors pass them, "I was thinking about after she's born." He steps into the elevator – thankfully empty – after Addison. "What if you and Alex lived there for a couple of weeks? You and I are the only ones who get parental leave. Might make things easier."

She'd thought about that, but not the logistics of it. "Does the house even have running water?"

"It will when she gets here."

"So right now…?"

"Not so much," he admits.

"Okay. But if you don't have running water by then, you're moving onto my couch. Deal?"

"Deal. Oh, and we should start thinking about…"

"Names, yeah." There's a list in her office and she's sure Derek has something similar in his. "Want to grab dinner? My office and we'll figure it out?"

Derek nods. "Have a good surgery," he says as the elevator dings and the doors open.

"You too."

***

"Juliet?" Addison suggests.

Derek looks up. "She kills herself at the end of that play."

"Fair point." She crosses it off. "Olivia?"

"She's an ER nurse."

"This was a stupid rule."

"It was your rule."

"I know." She's beginning to regret that. Choosing a name that doesn't already belong to someone they know is harder than she thought. "We know too many people." She rips the page out of her small notebook, crumples it up, and tosses it on the table next to her with the others. "That's page three for me. Your turn."

"Tessa?"

"The woman Archer's ex-fiancée left him for."

"Victoria?"

"My gross anatomy lab partner."

"I wasn't?"

"No, you were too busy staring at my ass and I actually wanted to pass."

Derek pauses, intending to argue, but then shrugs. "She went OB, didn't she?"

Addison nods. "She's somewhere in Central Asia with Doctors Without Borders."

"You keep up with her?"

Addison stares at him over her glasses. "You should try having friends sometime. Beyond me and Mark."

"I have friends."

"Name one."

"Sam. Naomi. Savvy and Weiss." He counts off on his fingers.

"When was the last time you talked to any of them?"

Derek clears his throat and looks back at his list. "Anyway, we're not naming our daughter after people we know, so Victoria's off the list. Eden?"

"Little too Biblical."

"Susan?"

"Susan Shepherd?" She quirks an eyebrow at the alliteration.

He gestures for Addison to take over again.

"Vanessa?"

"Sat next to me in eleventh grade English."

Addison blinks at him.

"She was _really_ hot."

Addison presses her lips together, unsuccessfully biting back a smirk, but crosses the name off. "Cordelia?"

It's Derek's turn for the raised eyebrow.

"I like _King Lear_."

The eyebrow goes higher.

"Fine. No Shakespeare. Kylie? Please say no; it was really late and there was a VH1 special."

"If she wants to be a pop star, she can change her name."

"Thank you. Leah?"

"Cousin."

"You have, like, _seventy_ cousins, Derek. If we take them all off the table, you'll have to let me put Shakespeare back on."

"Half of them are named Emily, Anna, or Katherine, which we already threw out."

Addison groans and flops back in the chair. She lightly smacks herself in the head with her notebook. Several times. "Why is this so hard?"

Derek flips back through a couple of pages. "I'm just saying, we could lift the rule."

"I don't think the rule is the problem."

He sighs. "Yeah, I haven't liked any of those either."

She rests her arms atop her head and stares at the ceiling.

"Rachel?" Derek suggests.

Addison blinks and looks at him, then down at her stomach. "I like Rachel. Plus, I don't think I know any." She rests her hand on her stomach; thankful her daughter is settled now, finally, after a day spent kicking and moving around.

"Rachel Marie?"

She shakes her head. "As an Addison Adrienne, I can tell you the Marie Montgomery part of that name is going to be a mouthful." She un-crumples a page from earlier and scans through it. "Elizabeth?"

"Rachel Elizabeth," he tries.

"Rachel Elizabeth Montgomery-Shepherd."

A smile slowly grows across Derek's face. "Do we have a name?"

Addison smiles and settles her hands on her stomach. "I think we do."


	6. heaven is a place on earth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which someone is a little bit early

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Heaven is a Place On Earth," Belinda Carlisle

Derek flicks the light switch. The lamp turns on, casting the nursery into a warm, sunny glow.

“Wow,” Meredith says, walking into the nursery. “This is…wow, Derek. All of it.”

He smiles. She hasn’t been in the house since he painted and the light fixtures went up. He’d left her to wander. The nursery is the only room that’s furnished right now, but the two of them have been shopping and there are a _lot_ of deliveries coming over the next week. “Yeah,” he agrees.

“I gotta tell you,” Meredith says as they walk downstairs. “I didn’t think you’d have it done in time.”

Derek laughs and leads her into the kitchen. He had his own doubts, but he’s not about to voice them. “And guess what?”

She raises her eyebrows.

He turns on the faucet with a proud smile. “Running water and _everything_.”

***

Half-awake, drawn out of sleep by something he can’t quite catch, Alex rolls over. Instead of Addison, he finds empty bed and cool, rumpled sheets. He shakes his head, casting off the last bit of sleep, and sits up. There’s a faint bit of light flickering from the hall.

He stops just at the edge of the living room ( _their_ living room; they've been living together a month and the awe still hasn't worn off) and grins. 3:30 in the morning and Addison’s sitting on the couch, in her pajamas, playing Resident Evil with the volume as low as she can make it. “What are you doing?” he says, half a sleepy laugh in his voice.

“She’s decided to practice kickboxing,” Addison says, taking out three zombies with a single shotgun blast. "It’s a new save file, don’t worry."

He wouldn’t have minded if she’d used his file; he’s played through the series enough times. He’s about to point out the zombie sneaking up in the back of the room, but she swaps her weapon, turns, and quick-scopes with the sniper rifle to shoot it in the head.

She has a pretty good farm going in Stardew Valley (this is not the first night Rachel’s gymnastics have kept her awake), their Animal Crossing island is taking shape largely thanks to her terraforming, and he’s gotten his ass kicked in almost every MarioKart race, but Alex did not peg her for a Resident Evil kind of woman. He says as much.

“I’m in year six. The farm’s gotten boring. And if I get attacked by one more scorpion, I’m gonna riot.” Back to the shotgun now, she’s actually managed to make the cover system work for her and gets the drop on the next group.

“You know you can unequip the net and they won’t attack, right?” He sits next to her.

“I do _now_.” A fire grenade and the room’s clear. She saves and pauses the game. “Did I wake you up?”

He shakes his head. “Wondered where you went, that’s all.” He studies her in the cool light of the TV. “You okay?”

“I go on maternity leave next week.” There's a calendar on the kitchen, still on May for another few days, but June 23rd is circled in bright green.

“Freaking out?” For all she’s physically prepared for her daughter’s arrival, Alex isn’t sure Addison has spent a lot of time _mentally_ preparing.

“Little bit.”

He nods. “Do you want to freak out, a hug, or me to go back to bed so you can keep playing?” Giving her choices helps ground her, he’s learned.

She laughs and leans her head on his shoulder. “She’s starting to settle. Hug and then hopefully we can both go back to bed?”

Alex presses a kiss to the top of her head. “You got it.” They shift around so her back is against his chest. He rests his chin on her shoulder.

Five minutes pass.

“Do the hug and me playing have to be mutually exclusive?”

“Nope.”

***

Two weeks later, Addison's standing in the shower, hand on her stomach. "Enough with the Braxton-Hicks, sweetie." It's been four days of this and she's getting tired of it. She's getting tired of being pregnant in general – literally _everything_ is uncomfortable, and she still has two weeks to go – but especially of the Braxton-Hicks contractions.

She takes a deep breath, centering herself, and washes out her shampoo. While she's pouring out a dollop of conditioner, she feels something wet against her legs that isn't water.

"Or you could decide to come early," she says. "I suppose that's okay, too."

She finishes her shower, dries off and dresses, and walks out into the living room towel drying her hair. "I'm in labor," she tells Alex, who's working through a particularly nasty section of monsters for her; she nearly broke the controller in frustration the other night.

He looks up.

"My water broke."

"Are you sure? I mean, you were in the shower and she's not due for another two weeks." On screen, Jill Valentine gets overrun by enemies and the game reloads to the last checkpoint.

Addison rests her empty hand on her hip and raises an eyebrow, grinning. "Are you seriously asking _me_ if I'm in labor?"

"…no?"

Laughing, Addison turns back to the bathroom to hang up the towel. "I'm gonna pack."

"Yeah," Alex says, mostly to himself, and then scrambles to turn off the console and stand up. "That's…I'll call the hospital, let them know we're on the way."

"Thank you!" she calls over her shoulder.

***

There’s a knock and then the door opens, revealing a doctor Alex doesn’t recognize. Short, with bright sunshine yellow hair, and an aura about her that reminds him of Bailey.

Addison looks up. “Tori?”

“Addison,” the newcomer smiles and pulls her hair up into a quick ponytail.

“I thought you were in Central Asia.”

She shrugs and flips through Addison’s chart. “We got back to Indiana a couple weeks ago, been moonlighting until we figure out where we want to land. And since _someone_ decided to go on maternity leave,” she eyes Addison, “your OB’s a little short staffed. Richard asked me to fill in. Stevens is in surgery, so you’re stuck with me for now.” She looks up from the chart and grins. “How’re you doing?”

“Well, I’m in labor.”

“Happens to the best of us.” Turning to Alex, she extends her hand. “Dr. Victoria Ryder.”

He shakes her hand. “Dr. Alex Karev.”

She gives Addison a look.

“Boyfriend,” Addison says. “Not this one’s father.”

Something jumps in Alex’s chest at her phrasing. He quiets it down, a vague thought and an unformed hope for another time.

The look continues. “Not super relevant, but who is?”

“Derek.”

Ryder’s eyebrows raise and disappear into her bangs. “I missed _so much_ while I was in Kazakhstan with no internet,” she mutters. She looks back down at Addison’s chart. “Alright. Everything looks good. Everything feel good?”

Addison clutches at Alex’s hand as she breathes through a contraction.

Alex looks at Ryder as Addison’s hand clenches around his in a vice grip. “Might want to rephrase that.”

“Yeah, I didn’t quite catch it before it came out of my mouth. Everything feel _normal_?”

Addison exhales. “Yeah.”

“Good.” She checks monitors and then places her stethoscope on Addison’s abdomen, listening. “I’m gonna check your cervix.” She washes her hands and puts on gloves and waits for Addison’s nod.

“Everything about this looks uncomfortable,” Alex observes, the words out of his mouth before he realizes he probably shouldn’t vocalize them in this exact moment.

Ryder snickers from between Addison’s legs.

“That’s because it is,” Addison confirms tightly.

“Alright, you’re at about five.” Ryder pulls back, snaps her gloves off, and washes her hands again. “You know the drill. No food and no liquids. Popsicles and ice chips are okay. A lot of this,” she gestures, “and then the big push. If you want the epidural, you’ve got a couple hours before we hit the point of no return on that.” She writes a few notes in Addison’s chart.

Addison nods. “Can you find Derek? He might like to know his daughter’s about to arrive.”

She clicks her pen against the chart and sets it back in the pocket at the end of the bed. “Will do. I’ll be back in a bit.” She pauses are the door and turns. “Oh, quick tip: we’ve got the red, white and blue popsicles, but they’re pretty popular. Act fast if you want one.” With a grin and a wink, she’s gone.

“She’s…something,” Alex says when Ryder leaves.

Addison laughs. “No kidding. We went to med school together.”

“She good?”

“She’s _great._ She,” the rest of that sentence is lost in the grimace of a contraction.

He lets her squeeze his hand as hard as she wants. “Can I get you anything?” he asks when it’s over.

“One of those popsicles sounds great, actually.”

Alex grins and gives her hand a gentle squeeze. “You got it.”

While he’s digging in the freezer – Ryder wasn’t kidding, the box is almost empty – he hears Ryder on the phone with an OR, informing the other end that she will politely shove that neural probe somewhere it definitely doesn’t belong if Derek doesn’t get his ass out of surgery and down to OB in the next three hours.

Grinning, popsicle in hand, Alex heads back to Addison’s room.

***

“Couple more,” Izzie says.

“I’m going to kill you,” Addison hisses through clenched teeth.

“Baby first, then murder,” Ryder says unfazed from the corner, observing Izzie. “You’re almost there, Addison. Couple more pushes for us, you can do it.”

“Where the hell is Derek?” His name turns into half a scream.

From his position behind her, Alex can’t see much of what’s going on, other than that it hurts like hell. Addison’s made it very clear that, next time, no one should allow her to pass on the epidural.

“He’s in surgery with a neural probe in someone’s brain,” Ryder says. “But that’s –”

The door slams open, revealing Shepherd, looking frazzled and somewhat out of breath. Alex catches a glimpse of Meredith outside in the hall. She gives him a little thumbs up.

“Sorry,” Shepherd breathes.

“He’s right here,” Ryder says cheerfully.

“I’m going to kill everybody in this room,” Addison mutters.

“Baby first, then murder,” Izzie repeats. She looks up at Addison over the tented sheet. “Addison, look at me. _Addison_.”

From Shepherd’s and Ryder’s reactions, he thinks the look Addison gives is more of a glare, but it must count enough for Izzie.

Alex has never seen Izzie look this intense. It’s a little scary. And very cool.

“I know this hurts like hell, but you’re almost through, okay?” At Addison’s silence, Izzie’s eyes narrow. “Okay?” This time, Addison nods. “Okay. When I say go, I need you to squeeze Alex’s hands, scream until your lungs bleed, and _push_.”

Alex brushes a sweaty lock of hair off her forehead and kisses Addison’s temple. “I got you,” he promises, taking her hand again. Shepherd steps up and takes her other hand. “ _We_ got you. When Izzie says go, okay?”

Addison gives a little nod. “Okay.”

“Alright. Squeeze, scream, and push. _Now_ , Addison.”

Addison does all three things at the exact same time.

***

Addison smiles as Rachel squirms against her chest before settling down. “Yeah, you moved a lot inside of me, too,” she murmurs, stroking a finger down her daughter’s back. She looks up when the door opens. Derek, with a takeout bag from Joe’s. She smells fries. “Oh, thank _god_.”

“Popsicles not doing it for you?” he says quietly with a grin. He sets the bag on the small table and takes out containers.

“I could eat an _entire cow_.” She’s delivered a lot of babies and walked a lot of people through labor, but somehow it never occurred to her that _she’d_ be exhausted and starving.

Derek smiles. “Well, I’ve only got part of one here,” he says, “but it has bacon on it.”

“You’re a saint.” She wasn’t thinking (or saying) the most charitable things about him earlier, but right now – right now he’s brought her food. She gets the tray situated, miraculously not disturbing Rachel’s slumber, and opens the container. Bacon cheeseburger, spicy fries, and two pickle spears.

She takes a bite of a pickle. "Two weeks early and facing the wrong way," she shakes her head. Rachel came out of her facing up, not down. If her birth is an indication of the rest of her life, they're both really, really screwed. She's looking forward to it.

"Are you mad that _your_ child didn't perform birth perfectly?" he teases.

Addison's eyes narrow in a friendly glare. "Shut up."

They eat the rest of dinner quietly – Addison only drips ketchup onto Rachel’s forehead once – and then sit in silence, staring at their daughter.

“We made that,” Derek says, reaching out to brush his finger across Rachel’s delicate cheek.

Addison smiles. “Yeah. We did.”

***

“Hey,” Alex catches up with Izzie after he finishes with rounds. “So that was pretty cool what you did in there earlier.”

Izzie finishes her note and clicks her pen against the chart. She looks at him with a wide, proud smile. “Yeah, it was. I’m kind of a rockstar.”

He grins. “You are.”

Ryder comes up behind her, eating a grape popsicle. “You are,” she agrees. “You did a great job, Stevens,” she says, offering Izzie a popsicle of her own.

Izzie beams brightly. “Thank you.” She unwraps the popsicle. It’s one of the red, white, and blue ones.

Alex knows that box has been empty for a solid four hours. Ryder must have stashed it somewhere earlier.

Ryder smiles. “Talking her through it at the end – perfect. You sure you haven’t done this before?”

“Nope,” Izzie shakes her head and bites off the red tip. “First time,” she says around a mouthful of popsicle.

“Couldn’t tell.” She gives Izzie a celebratory pat on the arm. “Good job today. Enjoy your popsicle.” She picks up the chart a nurse hands her and heads off.

If Alex didn’t know it was against the laws of gravity, he’d say Izzie was _floating_. “What’s up with you?” He knows the high of getting praise from an attending. This is something else.

“I was _so nervous_ ,” she admits. “I mean, she’s _Addison Montgomery_ and I’m _delivering her baby_?” She gestures with her popsicle. “I just.” She exhales heavily, still smiling. “Holy shit.”

Cristina slides up and leans against the nurses’ station, little notebook in hand. “Yeah, yeah, you’re a pink and squishy rock star, whatever. I need an exact time of birth.”

Izzie sighs. “6:42pm.”

“Who won the day?” Alex asks. He knows it wasn’t him – he had next Wednesday.

“Sloan. And time goes to,” she flips through the notebook, “are you kidding.”

“What?” Alex and Izzie ask at the same time.

With a sigh, Cristina flips around the notebook. In the square marked 18:30-18:45 is _Addison Montgomery_.


	7. dear future self: i hope it's going well

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Trout, kid time, boyfriends who can walk you back from panic attacks are keepers, a cheeseball line from the original gets recycled

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Dear Future Self," Fall Out Boy

The house by the lake is oddly silent without anyone else in it. Addison doesn't mind the solitude – it's nice after two weeks of constant people – it's just strange. She keeps expecting Alex, Meredith, or Derek to walk by. Or her parents, though they were only here for a blissfully short weekend in which they were mostly interested in Rachel and didn't have quite as much time as they may have hoped to judge her life choices; she even managed to introduce them to Alex almost as a drive-by. Carolyn and Derek's sisters left two days ago; though Amelia's still here, angling for a job at Seattle Grace.

Addison gathers up Rachel, a bottle of water, and a book and makes her way to the deck. She's _finally_ able to walk without feeling like she's waddling in pain anymore. She sits in an Adirondack chair – walking okay or not, she's going to need someone's help getting out of it again – and settles Rachel in her lap to enjoy the warm June night.

"You know," she says as Rachel continues to sleep solidly. "You were supposed to be born today. But," she grins as the girl squirms around a little to find a comfier position, "I think that's alright. I get an extra two weeks with you." Addison settles into silence, listening to crickets and the occasional hoot of an owl or the deep croak of a bullfrog. Despite her inability to use a blowdryer, and definitely despite Derek's incessant need to be up at three in the morning to fish, she enjoyed the solitude and calm out here. Not so much the trailer itself, but it's peaceful here, by the lake in the woods.

She picks up _The Sun Also Rises_ , a random grab from Derek's bookshelf while her Kindle is charging. She makes it halfway through the first chapter before she feels her daughter's tiny arms and legs stretch and wiggle the girl out of a nap. Rachel doesn't cry, simply watches in fascination as Addison sets the book on the arm of the chair. Her wide, deep blue eyes follow her mother's every move.

"Hey, kid." Addison smiles and nudges Rachel's hand with her index finger, quickly finding tiny fingers wrapped around it. The two stare at each other until Rachel gets distracted by the lights of Derek's car driving up the long road. Addison reaches for the water at the same time and Rachel, unsure which to look at, settles on the book. Laughing, Addison shakes her head. "No, I'm not reading you Hemingway. You can do that on your own." Her smile softens. Rachel's inquisitive eyes stare up at her, as if waiting for her to continue.

"I have absolutely no idea what to say to you. Which is odd, because I work with people younger than you. You'd think I'd have some stock speech by now." Addison pauses. "But you should know that I love you and you're perfect and," she spots Derek stepping out of his car and raises her voice just a little so he can hear, "your father is very strange and does things like bring trout into the house."

"I did that _once_ ," Derek defends himself.

"Once was about two times too many."

His brow furrows as he tries to figure out _negative one trout_. Shaking his head, giving up on the math, he kisses Rachel hello and sits in the chair next to them. He reaches out and plays with Rachel's brown hair. "I have no idea what to do with her."

"Me neither," she admits. She knows the physical pieces, as does Derek, but the rest is a mystery.

Derek blinks and looks up at her. "You work with babies."

Addison shrugs. "I don't really work with healthy ones," she says quietly and a little sadly. She teases Rachel's open lips, grinning widely when Rachel sucks on her pinky.

He presses a quick, supportive kiss to her temple. "Have you eaten yet?"

"If you're about to offer me trout, then yes. I've already eaten and am not hungry," she smirks.

"I said it before and I will say it again: no trout for you." He smiles. "I picked up Chinese on the way home."

"How'd you know?" She's been craving kung pao chicken for three days.

He offers her his hand and helps her out of the chair. "Alex told me you were lusting after it."

***

A month later, Addison sits on the floor of Rachel's nursery, folding laundry with Alex while Derek gets some quality Rachel time.

"Okay, I _know_ we didn't come with all of this," she says, gesturing to the pile around them. "Is this because I skipped the baby shower?" At the time it made sense – she didn't need people to buy things for her, and figuring out her life seemed to be a higher priority than throwing herself a party – but the amount of clothing spread out on the floor around them doesn't seem like it's going to fit into the suitcases they brought. Half of it isn't even going to fit Rachel for another few months.

Alex laughs and nods his head. "People keep handing me stuff at the hospital."

She exhales and twists, bracing her arms against the dresser. Her spine cracks and she sighs in relief.

"You ready to go home?" He folds up a shirt that's way too big for Rachel right now.

Nodding, Addison twists the other direction. "Oh, shit, we don't have any food." She laughs – it's not funny, but she hasn't slept in what feels like two months. Everything is funny. If she doesn't laugh, she's going to careen right into hysteria.

Alex shakes his head and folds the remaining mismatched socks together. "Sloan and Torres stocked up for us."

"Remind me to write them both into my will for that." She covers a yawn as she folds another onesie. Yankees, from Mark, though a very different design than the one he bought in New York. It even has _Montgomery-Shepherd_ embroidered on the back, jersey number one.

***

Derek wakes up to tiny cries filtering through the baby monitor on the nightstand. He groans.

"It's your turn," Addison says sleepily from beside him. For ease of parenting, they've often ended up asleep – passed out, more likely – in the same bed if Alex or Meredith isn't here.

"I got home an hour ago," he returns, barely awake.

"The last time I took your turn and let you sleep, I got poison oak." Half her words are muffled by a pillow.

Though he's not entirely sure how she might get poison oak from walking ten feet down the hallway, Derek concedes and slides out of bed.

A smile tugs at the corners of his mouth as he sets eyes on his daughter. By the time he reaches her, all traces of annoyance at being pulled out of a much-needed sleep have disappeared. He gently lifts Rachel up and into his arms, glad that a quick pat of a diaper check comes back negative. He kisses her cheek as he cradles her against his chest. "Hi, little one," he whispers, lovingly rubbing her back to calm her. He hums softly, a little nonsense tune he's too tired to make up words for, and sways her in his arms. A month and a half today. Time flies.

"You're going home with your mom in a couple days," he starts, walking them over to the rocking chair in the corner. "Me and her, we're not really together. We were, once. Married, actually. Things didn't work, I guess. But then something happened and she came to me for a hug and, well, we made you." He glances down at her. It's a pretty terrible explanation of things, but he figures he has some time before they need to actually explain everything to her. "She loves Alex and I love Meredith. So things are a little complicated. But we both love and care about you so very much. And I'll be over to see you all the time, okay?"

Rachel yawns and stretches her arms up over her head. She squirms a little and then settles against him. He bounces her slightly as he heads downstairs to warm up a bottle.

"There you go," he says softly as she latches on, drinking eagerly.

***

When Rachel's cries don't show any signs of settling despite that Addison left to check on her a few minutes ago, Alex goes to the nursery to investigate. She's three months old now and while she's beginning to sleep a little more consistently, her crying seems to be less predictable.

He finds Addison sitting on the floor, knees tucked to her chest, head in her hands. He can't tell from this distance, but he's pretty sure she's crying with the same intensity as Rachel. He rushes over to her, leaving Rachel to cry for a few more minutes. "Addison," he says softly, kneeling in front of her.

She shakes her head. "She won't stop crying." Her breath hitches in her throat as her shoulders heave with sobs. She threads her hands through her hair.

Alex lightly grasps her hands, detangling her fingers through her hair. Her pulse is racing. "Breathe, Addison."

"I'm trying," she gasps.

A car alarm starts in the parking lot and she curls into herself even tighter, shaking.

He knows exactly one way of talking someone down from a panic attack, short of drugs they don’t have nearby. "Tell me five things you can see," Alex says.

"What?" she manages to get out between sobs.

"Five things you can see. Go."

"You. The crib. The carpet. Which needs to be vacuumed."

He shakes his head. "No judgment, only things you can see. Two more."

"Rainbow nightlight. Rocking chair."

"Good. Four things you can hear."

She sniffles. "Your voice. Rachel, crying. Car alarm in the parking lot. Rain."

He kisses her forehead. She isn't shaking anymore. "Three things you can touch."

A thready breath. "You. The dresser," she reaches out next to her, as if proving to herself she can touch it. "Uhm. Floor?" She rests her palms on the floor.

"Two things you can smell."

"Uhm…baby wipes. Your shirt, the laundry detergent."

"Good. And one thing you know is true."

"I live in Seattle."

She's still crying, as is Rachel, but at least her breathing isn't as shallow or rapid. Alex coasts his hand across her back. "I've got you."

Rachel's cries pitch up into full shrieks and he feels Addison tense again.

"I can't," she whispers against his shoulder.

"If you want me to," he says. He's not about to kick Addison out of her daughter's nursery, but she won't ask for the exit unless he offers.

Nodding, Addison slips out of his embrace and stands. Alex catches sight of a new wave of tears as she slinks out, shoulders slumped, defeated.

Once he has Rachel settled, Alex pokes his head into their bedroom to check on her mother. Addison’s sitting on the bed, staring at her hands and a crumpled tissue.

“I don’t know what I was thinking," she says, so quietly he barely hears her, "that I could do this alone.”

“Well,” he sits next to her on their bed, “for starters, you’re _not_ alone.” He doesn’t say anything else until she raises her eyes. When she does, he gives her a _look_.

“Yeah, I know. I just…” she looks down at her hands again.

Alex brushes a stray lock of hair out of her face and tucks it behind her ear. “I’m in this, Ads. You and me. With the thing and the other thing.”

She laughs through her slight tears. Alex takes it as a win.

“Let me help. Okay?”

Addison swallows and nods. “Okay.” She leans her head against his shoulder. “I’m really tired.”

He sets his arm around her and tugs her close. “I know.”

A few minutes pass before she speaks again. “I also really want a shower.”

“I mean, I wasn’t gonna say anything,” Alex teases.

That gets a laugh out of her, however small. “You’re an ass,” she says.

“Yeah, but you love me anyway.” He presses a gentle kiss to the top of her head.

“I do.” She sighs.

The baby monitor transmits the soft sounds of Rachel starting to fuss again.

“I’ll get her,” Alex says, pulling away so he can see to Rachel before the fussing turns back to full-blown cries. “Go take a shower.” He gently tilts Addison’s chin up and kisses her softly. “I love you.”

***

A long, hot shower and a solid nap later, Addison feels like she’s approaching something human again. She’s still exhausted, still isn’t quite sure what day or time it is, but she’s clean and isn’t in danger of pitching forward and face-planting on the floor anymore. Small victories.

She lingers on the edge of the living room, watching Alex work his way through what she thinks is a Diablo dungeon. Rachel’s asleep in his lap and he’s holding the controller careful and steady to not disturb her. ”Hey,” she says quietly.

Alex looks over at her, just a quick glance. “Hey. Hang on, I’m almost through.”

“Take your time.”

A few minutes pass and then he clears the dungeon, transports back to the surface, hits a checkpoint, and closes the game. “Hey,” he says again. “How was your nap?”

“ _Glorious_.”

“There’s dinner in the fridge if you’re hungry.”

She thought she’d smelled food. She looks at the clock: 10:30pm. “I suppose I should get used to not having a sleep schedule,” she says, heading into the kitchen. There’s a container of pasta waiting for her – fettuccine alfredo, by the look of it – and she pops the lid off and sticks it in the microwave to heat up.

“It’s overrated anyway,” Alex says, joining her in the kitchen, Rachel shifted to his shoulder, still sound asleep.

"How did you manage to make dinner while holding her?" She grabs the microwave just before it beeps.

"Stuck her in the sink when I needed both hands," he shrugs.

Addison laughs quietly and takes her food out of the microwave. She briefly debates putting it in a bowl, but that’ll just become one more thing that needs to be washed. She grabs a fork and a glass of water and follows Alex back out to the living room.

“She ate a couple hours ago and also had a diaper change,” Alex says, sitting beside her on the couch.

Addison nods and takes a few bites of pasta. She’s starving, but food is a lot of work right now. She forces herself to eat; she’s still eating for two.

Alex sets a hand on her knee. “Are you okay?”

She’d bet the whole $581 she won on Rachel’s birth that he’s mentally working through the same checklist she is – the one Izzie gave her, the one she’s given to countless parents herself, about post-partum depression. It’s not that, at least she doesn’t think so, but she’s seen enough other new parents think everything is fine only to have it be crystal clear when they talk to her. She focuses on her food while she thinks. 

“I’m _exhausted_ ,” she admits, finally. She twirls the last bit of pasta around her fork and finishes dinner. “But I’ve…” she trails off for a moment. “I’ve been through depression before. This isn’t it."

New York was a maelstrom of mental health chaos, even before Derek caught her with Mark. It started with depression, then anxiety joined the party, and finally panic after that night in the rain. It occurs to her she’s never told Alex about any of that. She probably should, especially in light of earlier, but not tonight. Her emotional capacity is running on fumes right now. Explaining several years of mental health disasters is beyond her skills this evening.

"I'm just…exhausted,” she repeats.

Alex nods and gives her knee a little squeeze. “I’m here,” he says.

She curls her fingers around his. “Thank you.”

He turns his hand over to hold hers. “Let us help,” he says softly. “There’s four people with her. Six, if you count Sloan and Amelia. It doesn’t have to always be you.”

Addison nods. There's a lot she could say about that – Type A, control freak – but it doesn't feel like the right time for a self-deprecating joke. "Yeah," she breathes.

Rachel stretches against Alex, beginning to wake up. Addison reaches for her daughter and smiles at the sleepy girl. "Hi," she says, kissing Rachel's nose before settling her against her chest. Rachel makes a soft noise as she squirms around and Addison's smile grows as her tiny arms wave through the air. "Light of my life," she murmurs, tickling Rachel's sides.

She's _bone-tired_ , but she's happy.

After a few minutes, Alex picks up the controller again. "Do you mind?"

She shakes her head. "No, go ahead."

They slowly drift together, Addison curled against his chest with Rachel tucked in her arms. Alex loosely loops his arms around them both and kisses the top of Addison's head as he swaps the video game for a Bake Off rerun.

"You're the guy," Addison says after a while. Derek and Mark, they were guys. But Alex…he's _the_ guy.

Alex looks at her with a soft smile. "You're the girl."


	8. and it's hard to dance with a devil on your back

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> hey so about last night, Miranda Bailey: Voice of Reason, emergency babysitting, closure

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Shake it Out," Florence + the Machine

“Uhm.” Addison tucks her hair behind her ear. “About last night, in the nursery.”

Alex turns to her, toothbrush in his mouth. “Yeah?” he says around a mouthful of toothpaste.

“That…happens, sometimes. Not often, but.” She stares down at her feet. Not in nearly a year. If she’s being honest, she’d been expecting it sooner. “Thanks for talking me off that cliff.”

He nods, spits out his toothpaste, and rinses his mouth. “You got it. Was that, was that the right way to help?”

Truthfully she prefers Ativan and not actually dealing with it, but that’s not an option at the moment. The way he walked her through it – supporting her, grounding her, even amidst Rachel’s cries – was exactly what she needed even though she didn’t know it at the time. “Yeah.”

He nods and then his eyes shift sideways, like he’s thinking. “Can I ask about something you said?”

She nods.

“You mentioned depression. Is there anything I need to know?”

Addison freezes. But there’s no hint of judgement in his voice. Not like Derek, when he found a prescription bottle and made what he thought was a harmless crack about happiness. Not like Mark, who tried so hard to be understanding but simply couldn’t grasp that logic and rationality didn’t apply here. Alex is just…concerned. About her. _Just_ about her. No strings, no ego, no make-a-plan-to-fix-it.

Sometimes the weight of how much Alex cares about her, how much he loves her, sends her staggering. Good thing she’s leaning against the door.

She shakes her head. “No, that’s. Things with Derek were a mess before Mark happened and then Mark happened and everything spiraled and,” she feels herself snowballing down a hill, but Alex catches her with a little squeeze of her hand.

“It did a number on you,” he says.

Six words and an astonishingly accurate summary of three years of her life. “Yeah,” she says softly, squeezing his hand in return. “That’s…I left that in New York." As much as she could, at least. Some of it followed her to Seattle, lingering in the back of her mind as she tried to fix a marriage that had failed two years earlier. Rachel has helped. Alex has helped. _Moving on_ has helped. The books are closed on Mark and Derek, locked away on a dusty shelf somewhere she can't reach, let alone think about re-opening. "I’m good, now.”

She's said some variation on those three words countless times over the last year; to Archer, to Naomi, to Tori, to Savvy, to herself, to the therapist she sometimes still video chats with back in Manhattan. It's only now, standing here in their bathroom, 5:30 in the morning on a Tuesday, that she thinks she actually means it.

He smiles at her, just a flash of his cheeky grin, and gently tugs her in for a hug. She happily takes the few steps toward him, sighing contently when he wraps his arms around her shoulders.

“I meant it, you know,” she says, half-muffled into his shoulder. She hugs him in return, settling her arms around his waist. “The thing about you being the guy.”

She feels him smile and brush a kiss against her cheek. “Good. ‘Cause I meant my thing too.”

***

Going back to work is easier than Addison thought. She can stop by and see Rachel whenever she wants at the hospital daycare and it’s nice to do something else again. She and Derek even have a relatively stable schedule, switching off Rachel every week or so.

But sometimes she feels like a terrible mother for looking forward to and enjoying the weeks her four month-old is somewhere else. There’s more than one way to be a parent, as she tries to remind herself when rounding on one mother who scheduled her c-section around trial dates and another who quit her boardroom job the moment she learned she was pregnant.

“It’s not supposed to be all sunshine and rainbows,” Miranda says, scrubbing in next to her. “It’s hard work and sometimes you don’t want to do it.”

Addison turns on the sink and unwraps a bar of soap. “Yeah,” she says quietly. “It’s hard not to compare, though.”

“Remember that what you see is everyone else’s highlight reel. Just because Jane,” she nods toward their patient on the table, “has three kids, another on the way, and looks like she enjoys every moment of it and has her whole damn life together does not mean she actually does.”

Addison exhales. She needed to hear that, and needed to hear it from someone who isn’t herself. “Thank you.”

Jane survives, and so does her baby, and Addison goes home to quiet and calm, does two of their three loads of laundry, orders takeout, and cheers her boyfriend on while he plays Overwatch.

***

Derek kisses Rachel’s cheek as he buckles her into her carrier. She giggles and flails her arms and legs around before he gets everything settled.

“There we go,” he says, clasping the last buckle. He settles a soft knit hat – Yankees, courtesy of Mark, who seems more determined than he is that Rachel not grow up a Mariners fan – atop her head and boops her nose. She giggles again, wide and happy. “Let’s go home.” He zips up his coat against the chill November air, shoulders the diaper bag, and lifts her up.

He likes this, the house switching. He visited enough during Addison’s maternity leave, but it was almost always at her place. He likes being able to take his daughter _home_ ; to talk to her, read to her, just _be_ with her in his own house. It’s different at home. Less like he was visiting his friend who just had a baby and more like he’s actually a father.

But his plans for dinner and reading aloud to a five month-old who doesn’t understand a word of what he’s saying go sailing out the door the minute he steps off the elevator and sees preparation for chaos underway.

“There you are,” Meredith says, taking a moment to wave at Rachel. “Tour bus versus semi. First wave inbound in ten. One spinal separation, one compound skull fracture.”

Amelia rushes past. “Dibs on the spinal separation,” she says, pausing briefly to kiss Rachel’s cheek.

“You’re –” he calls after her, but she’s already out of earshot. She waves back and Derek sighs, rubbing his temples. “She’s gonna be the death of me,” he mutters. “You said ten?”

“More like eight, now.”

He sighs again, mentally inventories the surgical staff, and comes up with exactly one available neuro attending: him. And daycare is closed for the night. “I’m gonna go find someone to watch her,” he gestures with the carrier. ”Make sure Amelia gets the skull fracture. I don’t want a resident trying to hero a spinal separation until I can look at it.”

Meredith nods and walks through the trauma bay, assigning known cases. He watches for a moment, proud. She’s _good_ , stepping into chief resident shoes years before they’ll even be offered.

Rachel fusses, unsettled by the noise and chaos, and he returns his attention to his daughter. Addison and Alex are both gone for the night, he and Meredith are about to be very occupied, and so Derek looks around the area. He finds nobody he’d trust her with – they’re all medical professionals and he technically trusts all of them not to drop her on her head, but this is his daughter and he isn’t going to pick a random nurse or intern – until the elevator doors open and Mark steps off.

“What’s going on?” Mark asks, staring at the chaos.

“Tour bus versus semi.”

Mark grimaces. “Who won?”

“Hard to tell. Hey, what are you doing tonight?”

“I was going to go home, order Mexican, drink a beer and watch the Seahawks get their asses kicked. Why? You don’t need me for this.”

Ambulance sirens begin to wail, growing louder as they get closer.

“Sorry to kill your very exciting plans,” Derek says without an ounce of regret in his tone, “but I need you to watch Rachel until Addison can get back here and pick her up.”

Mark gives Rachel a tiny wave. “You could’ve led with that, you know.” He takes the carrier and diaper bag from Derek. “Go be God, save some lives. I’ll be in my office.”

“Thank you!” Derek shouts over his shoulder. He sends off a quick text to Addison as the first ambulance arrives.

***

Mark pokes at his plants, checking what needs to be watered. Rachel makes a happy noise and he looks back at her. She’s staring at him in fascination, though the way the leaves move is probably what’s grabbed her attention. “Don’t judge,” he says.

She giggles again and grabs at one of the plastic toys attached to her carrier handle.

“It was a reaction to your mom leaving me and then it…got out of hand.” An understatement. Save for part of his desk, there isn’t a flat surface in his office that doesn’t have a plant on it. They were a good distraction for a while. Now he just likes them.

“Speaking of,” Mark says, pouring half a glass of water into the pothos. “There’s a lot of weird history you got born into.” Also an understatement. And one he doesn’t know how to follow. So he doesn’t, just moves from the pothos to the fern to the jade.

His phone buzzes with a text from Addison: _be there around 8:30, that okay?_

He texts her back – _take your time_ – and then finds a quiet cover playlist on Spotify and sets it to play through the bluetooth speakers hidden somewhere in the leaves. It starts with a soft version of “Enter Sandman” and he shrugs; Derek’s going to make her listen to The Clash, Addison’s going to make her listen to Taylor Swift and Halsey, he might as well fill in the gaps.

A _lot_ of weird history she got born into. 

“You’re a good kid,” Mark says. “You ever need someone on your side, call me. I’ve got your back,” he promises his goddaughter.

Rachel smiles widely, a big toothless grin, and waves her hands and feet through the air.

***

Mark looks up at the soft knock on his door. “Yeah?”

Addison sticks her head in. The rest of her soon follows; she’s wearing a deep green scarf he always liked on her. “Hey. I hear you have my kid.”

“I do,” he says. “She fell asleep about half an hour ago.” Fed her, changed her diaper, and got her to sleep. All without having to having to find someone in peds for help. He’s proud of that. “I would’ve dropped her off, but I don’t have a car seat.”

She smiles, still the same disarming smile he fell in love with. “It’s okay. Thanks for watching her.” She sits down on the couch where he’s settled Rachel in her carrier and trails a finger down her daughter’s cheek.

“I,” he starts. “I gotta ask so I can,” he shakes his head. _Closure_ , his $250 an hour therapist keeps harping on him to get. Addison’s been with Karev for a year and Mark hasn’t seen her this happy since…ever, actually. He's pretty sure she cut her end of their thread the night she walked out, but he needs to be certain.

Addison tilts her head and looks at him with concern in her eyes.

“So I can close a book,” Mark finally says. “You and me. There’s no hope of that, is there, Red?”

She shakes her head. “No.”

He’s heard that from Addison about their relationship before, more than once. Three times, if he’s counted correctly. This is the first time it’s sounded _kind_. This is the first time he’s felt _relief_ when she says it. A cool, soothing wave washes over him, taking the tangled mess back out to sea.

He exhales slowly. _Bad air out_.

“Feel good to let me go?” she asks quietly after a moment.

“Yeah,” he says, a little surprised at how _light_ he feels. “I mean. No offense.”

The smile returns and his heart does a tiny little flip flop. Habit. A few more waves need to come before it’s all washed out to sea, but it’s a good start.

“None taken.”

They sit in silence for a few moments, before Addison speaks again. “I’m gonna take her home. You should head out too; it’s getting late.”

It isn’t, it’s barely approaching 9:00, but Mark appreciates what she’s trying to do. “Gonna finish a few things and then I’m gone. Scout’s honor.” He purposely holds up the wrong number of fingers.

Addison laughs, a sparkling sound that now wraps him in comfort, not longing. “Have a good night, Mark,” she says as she shoulders the diaper bag and lifts up Rachel. “Thanks again for watching her.”

He flashes her a smile. “Anytime.”


	9. in any given storm

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> alex/addison first anniversary date

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Cast Away," Cœur de Pirate

Alex lets out a low appreciative whistle when Addison walks out of their bedroom. The fluttery emerald green dress hugs every curve, ending just above her knees. As she walks, a small strip of skin, ivory white and tempting, shows between where her dress ends and her soft black boots begin. She does a little spin on the hardwood, smiling.

“You like?” she asks with a cheeky eyebrow.

Biting back a comment about wanting to see that dress on the floor, Alex stands. “You are _smoking_ hot,” he says, settling his hand on the small of her back. He gently tugs her in for a quick kiss. She’s a few inches taller than him in her heels. He doesn’t mind.

Addison pulls back and gives him her own once-over. Her gaze drags slowly down his body, taking in the dark blue – almost black – pants, navy shirt, and slate grey jacket. When her eyes meet his again, there’s heat smoldering behind them. “Back at ya,” she says.

Grinning, Alex helps her into her jacket, a black peacoat that allows the bottom of her dress to peek out. As he settles the coat on her shoulders, he allows his fingertips to brush across her collarbone. Weird that it’s been over a year; there are days he struggles to remember life when they weren’t together, and also days when it’s staggering that he gets to go home to _her_ and not a house full of random surgical staff.

They’ve missed the actual day by at least a solid month, thanks to both life and neither of them being sure whether to count their first date or the date he asked her out as their anniversary, but neither of them mind. It’s early December, still close enough to both days to be a first year anniversary dinner for whichever they decide.

Alex locks the door behind them and follows her to the elevator, taking the opportunity to enjoy how great her ass looks. There’s a little sway in her hips that isn’t usually there. He grins.

Addison turns when she reaches the elevator, hair cascading over her shoulder, and throws him a wink. “Enjoying the view?” She pushes the call button.

He gives her another intentional, long, slow look up and down her body as he reaches her by the elevator. When his eyes meet hers again, a faint blush colors her cheeks. Success. “Always.”

***

Addison catches his hand as they leave the restaurant, loosely twining their fingers together. It's beginning to snow; tiny white flakes dance and swirl in the air before melting on the ground. A few blocks out from the restaurant, Alex quietly settles his arm around her waist, pulling her in close. She smiles, appreciating both the extra warmth and the extra contact. They turn down the street of their intended coffee shop and Addison gasps.

A Christmas tree rises from the center courtyard, fully lit in white and decorated in white and gold. Warm twinkling lights weave through bare branches of trees lining the sidewalk. She swears she sees glitter blow through on the air amidst the snow. Addison feels Alex lean his chin on her shoulder and wrap his arms around her waist. He brushes a kiss to her cheek and she smiles, covering his hands with hers as she leans back into his embrace.

Christmas is _magical_. The last few have felt off, sad, missing a piece as she worked through turning _our season_ into _my season_. But now she's here, with Alex, their second Christmas together coming up, and he's looking at the tree and the lights and the snow with the same awe she feels on her own face. Maybe it can be an _our season_ again. Maybe it already is. 

She shifts in his arms, turning toward him. Windswept hair sticks to her rosy cheeks, but Alex's hand is there just before hers to brush it away. She catches his hand on her cheek and smiles.

"What?" he says, stroking his thumb across her cheekbone.

Addison thinks for a moment, whether to give voice to the words she's been thinking for the last month. "I love you," she says quietly. "And you're the last man I want to say that to."

Snowflakes swirl up around them, sparkling in the lights.

Alex smiles softly as he lets her continue. He holds her hands in his, keeping them warm.

She takes half a step further into him. "I love you beyond the thing and the other thing. Beyond just being in this. I –" she feels herself beginning to ramble; she didn't have much of this planned. Big speeches have never been her thing.

"Addison," he gently squeezes her hands to catch her, "what are you saying?"

She takes a deep breath. He always knows how to ground her, how to steady her. The lighthouse in her storm. "I want to spend the rest of my life with you."

Alex smiles, just a little flutter of a grin, and takes his own half step forward. He lets go of her hands and coasts his hands up over her arms, to her shoulders, to cup her cheeks. He spends a moment just looking at her, and Addison sees twinkling lights reflected in his eyes like stars. "I want to spend the rest of my life with you, too," he whispers before he kisses her, deeply and thoroughly. His hands slide to her hair, threading through loose red curls as he slips his tongue past hers.

The snow picks up, whirling around them as they kiss. Addison feels like she's in a snow globe.

They skip coffee and head home.

***

As it turns out, the dress looks better on her than it does on the floor. But he's pretty happy with what happens when her dress is on the floor, so he's not going to complain.

***

She rests her head on his bare chest, watching the snow fall outside, glittering in the moonlight. "You're a lighthouse," she says after a while.

"Hm?" Alex drags a finger down her spine, settling his warm hand on her lower back.

Addison turns, resting her chin on her clasped hands over his chest. "You're a lighthouse," she repeats. "A beacon of hope in the storm of my life." She knows she would've made it through her pregnancy and the last six months without him, because that's what she does: survive and make it through. But she doesn't know _how_. She's grateful that she didn't have to find out. Her fingertips trace idle designs across his chest, unconscious spirals and patterns. "Throughout everything in the past year – being pregnant, Mark, Rachel, all of this," she pauses in her designs to gesture between them, "you've been a lighthouse. Showing me the way home."

It hits her, then. She's never had someone be her lighthouse before. Her life has almost always been a storm and she's been searching for light amidst darkness and waves and wind and rain. It wasn't until Alex that she finally saw it. Safe harbor in any given storm.

Idly, she wonders if that's why she looked for him that day at the hospital, when all she had was a late period and a few days of nausea.

"I," she pauses. _Thank you_ seems inadequate, even trite. "I didn't know how important that was," she says instead.

Alex smiles. He reaches out and brushes a stray lock of hair behind her ear. "I love your storm," he begins. "Nope," he says softly with a smile when she starts to speak. He settles a finger on her lips. "My turn."

She smiles, kisses his finger before he takes it away, and nods.

"Your storm is a natural disaster. It's chaotic and wild and unpredictable and often the only thing I can do is hang on. But that storm brought me _you_. That storm brought me love and a future I didn't see a path to." His fingers coast across her bare shoulders, mapping constellations out of freckles. "And if I'm the lighthouse in your storm, then I promise you to stay standing and lit, because I need you to know the way home from your storm, Ads. To me."

Addison wipes a few tears away. "I love you," she whispers. She slides a little bit up his chest to kiss him, gentle and slow. Her hair curtains around them until Alex abandons his celestial map on her shoulders and instead tangles his fingers in her hair and deepens the kiss. "Round two?" she asks, sitting up and pulling away from him just a little. The sheet's fallen to her waist, giving him what she's sure is an impressive view.

Alex settles his hands on her hips, stroking his thumbs over that sensitive skin, and Addison barely has time to register his thighs tightening before she finds herself flipped over into the bed, with Alex smirking above her. "I could go for a round two." He dips his head, capturing her lips in a searing kiss.

***

Later, when the snow has turned into rain and they've even managed a round three, Addison curls up against his chest, tangling their legs together. She smiles. She'd been using dead reckoning to make it out of her storms her entire life. Now she has a _lighthouse_.


	10. gotta let go of all of our ghosts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Several decisions, several revelations, and I think drunk!Addison is the peak of my comedy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Send My Love (To Your New Lover)," Adele

One morning when Rachel is eight months old, Addison finally reaches the end of her rope with the bathroom. "I'm thinking about houses," she says, reaching around Alex to get her toothbrush.

He pauses in his shaving and looks over at her. "Like as a concept? Or…?"

"To live in." She squeezes toothpaste out. "The condo was always a stopgap so I wasn't raising Rachel in a hotel room." It's nice, but there are parts of it that just don't work. She knows that no place is perfect but, among other things, the master bathroom needs more than one sink.

Alex shrugs and returns to shaving. "Okay."

"You're cool with it?" she says around a mouthful of toothpaste.

"I mean, I'm invited, right?" he smirks.

She waits until he's done with a stroke and then bumps her hip against his. "Of course."

***

Addison’s checking a few texts: one from her mother _– I'm a lesbian dear, deal with it_ – as if last night's entire phone call and revelation could be summed up in a cavalier text with the crown emoji; and one from their real estate agent – a house both of them hated just by the pictures is no longer on the market – when something catches her eye.

Meredith’s scribbling a note and something on her hand flashes again in the dim recovery room light as she closes and files their patient's chart.

Addison blinks and puts her phone away. "Hang on."

A slight flush colors Meredith's cheeks, visible even in the shadows. She slowly turns back to Addison, an expression on her face somewhere between guilt and happiness. "Derek proposed last night," she says, quickly, as if trying to get all the words out on top of each other so she can go do something else.

Addison thought she'd feel something. Anger, sadness, frustration, pain. Something big and bulky that takes up way more space than she wants it to. Instead, a strange sense of calm washes over her. She's long closed the book, and now the series is finally over. A door she didn't know was still open shuts and locks for good, forever sealing off all that history. She can walk forward, really walk forward, without that little hint of _what if_ teasing at the edges of her vision. She wonders if this is what Mark felt when she told him there was no chance for them.

Smiling, she opens her arms for a hug. "Congratulations."

Meredith hesitantly steps forward. "We're hugging," she observes.

"We are." Addison pulls back. "Was that weird?"

"I mean, I stole your husband."

Addison shrugs. "You can have him," she says. "Congrats, seriously."

Finally, Meredith lets herself smile, really smile. She's almost glowing. "Thank you, Addison."

"Just promise me one thing: do not let him bring a whole trout into the house."

Laughing, Meredith nods as they walk out. "We've already had that discussion. Multiple times."

***

_AK: you okay?_

_AM: yeah, why?_

_AK: the thing with your mom last night_

_AK: also you heard about meredith and derek, right?_

_AK: just checking in_

_AM: oh, that_

_AM: Still processing the Bizzy thing. Probably going to be processing that for a while honestly_

_AK: valid_

_AM: And yeah, heard about them. I hugged Meredith._

_AK: was that weirder for you or for her?_

_AM: jury's out_

_AK: lol_

***

“You are _wound up_ ,” Mark says, bouncing Rachel on his knee as Addison drains half a second glass of white wine in one go.

He’s not wrong. “Bizzy’s a lesbian,” she says.

Mark raises an eyebrow. “What?”

“My mother. She’s a lesbian.” She finishes the rest of the wine in two gulps. The phone call last night had been _weird_. Her whole _day_ has been weird. “Which means The Captain wasn't a cheater, it was all a sham. My whole childhood. Everything I believed about my dad, my mom, love, marriage. It's all…turned on its head.” She stands up, gets a refill from Joe – takes the bottle when he offers it – and sits back down. “So, yeah. I'm a little…wound up.”

Mark breaks open a peanut one-handed, careful to nudge the pieces out of Rachel's grabby hands, and tosses it into his mouth. “Wow.”

“She’s been in love with her assistant for like twenty years." She holds the chilled glass to her forehead. She takes a sip before starting again. "And she gave _me_ shit for _weeks_ about cheating on Derek – who she didn't even _like_ – when she's been doing the exact same thing and letting The Captain take the fall for it." She sighs.

Mark lifts his eyebrows as he opens another peanut. Rachel tries to grab it out of his hand but he deftly avoids her grasp and instead taps a finger on her nose. She giggles.

"So I'm going to sit here, drinking with my ex-boyfriend, while he babysits my daughter who I had with my ex-husband _after_ we divorced, until my current boyfriend gets out of surgery and can take my drunk ass home." She twirls the glass stem between her fingers. "Welcome to the Montgomery family, Rach," she lifts her glass in a mock toast. "Everyone grows up to be a soap opera."

Unsurprisingly, Rachel doesn't have anything to say about that other than a few spit bubbles.

"You're not a soap opera, Addie."

She looks at him over her now-empty glass.

"Okay, you're _kind_ of a soap opera, but honestly who isn't at our age?"

She squints. "Did you just call us _old_?"

Mark looks sideways, as if the correct answer to that question lies in the whorls of the wood paneling. "No?"

Addison sighs and slumps down in the booth. "Everything's just," she presses the heels of her palms against her brow for a moment, "flipped on its head," she repeats. She pours herself a reasonably-sized glass this time. "She was pissed at me about Derek. She makes it abundantly clear that she doesn't approve of how Rachel came to be, despite that she's been on me about grandchildren since, like, year _two_ with Derek. And I have to hang up on her any time she gets in the vicinity of talking about Alex. Meanwhile she casually reveals that she's been having an affair for _half my life_ and I'm just supposed to 'deal with it.'" Closing her eyes, Addison forces herself to take a few breaths.

"What else?"

She opens one eye. "What?"

He gives her a little shrug. "What else? That sucks, but it's not enough to wind you all the way up to four glasses of wine."

Closing her eye again, Addison clasps her hands on the table and then lays her head down. She feels a tiny hand grab at her hair. Despite the wine and despite today, she smiles. She lifts her head just enough to smile at her daughter. "Can I have my hair back?"

Rachel giggles, a wide toothless grin. Addison carefully extracts her hair from her daughter's fingers and sits up again. Rachel reaches for her and Addison takes her from Mark, lifting her across the table to sit in her lap. She kisses the top of Rachel's head, taking comfort in her soft baby smell. Pushing the wine glass away, she reaches for one of the glasses of water neither she nor Mark have touched.

"Derek and Meredith are engaged," she says, though she can't imagine a Seattle Grace in which Mark _wouldn't_ already know this. "Which I _don't care about_ ," she says emphatically, stabbing her straw into the lemon wedge. "I don't. I hugged her. She stole my husband and I hugged her. I don't care."

"Growth," Mark says, adding to his pile of peanut shells easier now that he can use both hands.

There's a hint of teasing in his voice and she ignores it. "Exactly. I've grown. And I don't care. I don't. I'm happy for them. Derek and I are ancient history." Rachel shifts in her arms and Addison pauses. "Well. As ancient as you can get when," she gestures to the nine month-old in her lap. "Anyway. We're ancient history. I'm happy with Alex. I don't care," she says again. She makes a face at herself; she _doesn't_ care, but she's thought those three words so much today and said them so much in the last two minutes that they don't sound like real words anymore. "It's just _weird._ You know?"

Mark stares at her across the table. "Yep."

Addison winces and wonders when he found out that she and Alex had started looking for houses. "I'm sorry."

He waves it off. "Ancient history."

Her phone buzzes then, a text from Alex letting her know that he's finished for the night and on his way over in a few minutes. Rachel starts to fuss and Addison checks her watch: they're running up on dinnertime. She pulls out a small container of Cheerios and sets a few on a napkin as a snack to hold Rachel over until they get home.

"This looks like a fun table," Derek says, coming up to them. He kisses Rachel's cheek and, without waiting for a response from Addison or Mark, he slides in next to Mark.

"Sure," Addison says dryly. “You can sit with us.” She switches back to wine. If Derek keeps that cheeky grin up, she's going to need way more than water to get through until Alex gets here.

Derek's brow raises as he registers how much of the bottle is gone and that Mark's drinking scotch. "What's with the wine?"

"Bizzy's a lesbian," Mark supplies, since Addison's mid-swallow.

She sets her glass down harder than she strictly needs to. "Okay, that's really not the point of that revelation. The point is that she's been having an affair for _twenty years_."

"Must run in the family." Derek grins and takes a sip of beer.

Mark snorts and Addison kicks him under the table while glaring at Derek. "I will kill you."

"You're really going to say that in front of our daughter?"

"Yes." She spies Alex walking in and gives him a little wave. Finally, a rescue. She buckles Rachel back into her carrier and packs up the rest of the Cheerios. "Well, this has certainly been an evening," she says as she stands up, smiling gratefully at Alex. "Mark, thank you for letting me vent. Derek, you're insufferable, but congratulations."

Alex slides his arm around her waist, half a hug before pulling back and taking Rachel to allow Addison to put her coat on. He waves at the other two and keeps a steadying hand on Addison's back as they walk out. She appreciates the assist; it's been a long time since she's had more than one glass of wine at once and these heels were a good idea this morning, _before_ she realized that the phone call with Bizzy wasn't a dream and _before_ she found out about her ex-husband's engagement.

"Thanks," she says as he buckles Rachel into her car seat and then makes sure she gets into the car without any incident.

"You okay?" he asks, starting up his car and driving them home.

Addison bursts out laughing. "I'm sorry," she laughs when he gives her a strange look. "I haven't drank in a while and I may have skipped lunch and that was three and a half glasses of wine in about an hour." She feels a little lightheaded, but in a good way.

Alex laughs. "Have I ever seen you drunk?"

Still laughing, Addison shakes her head. "I don't think so." Everything is funny. She doesn't remember being a giggly drunk. Then again, the last time she was drunk was a whole child ago.

"Pizza or tacos?"

"What?"

"Are you a pizza drunk or a tacos drunk?"

She thinks on that for a long time. A really long time. So long she starts laughing at herself for how long she's taking. They're halfway home before she finally decides. "Tacos."

"Good choice," he says. He unlocks his phone and hands it to her. "Can you manage ordering?"

"I think so," she says, overconfident in her own skills as she skips past the GrubHub app three times before realizing she needs to tap it. It takes her a few tries and she has Alex check everything when he's stopped at a red light – he has to undo the five orders of guacamole she put into the cart while trying to only add two – but she manages to send the delivery order off before they get home.

Feeding Rachel takes a little longer than usual, even with warming up a bottle, because Addison can't stop laughing. And because Addison can't stop laughing, Rachel won't either. All Rachel does is giggle happily at her mother and Addison tickles her sides, though she knows she should settle down and feed her soon so that she stays on a schedule.

Her ex-husband is engaged to the woman he left her for. Her mother is a lesbian and has been cheating for twenty years. Neither of these things are funny, but Addison can't stop laughing because she's drunk on three and a half glasses of wine and neither of the unfunny things matter when compared to the fact that her daughter's laugh is the greatest noise she's ever heard and that her boyfriend is answering the door for a delivery driver that has just brought them a ridiculous amount of tacos.

Alex steps out of the kitchen, tacos and extra guacamole on a plate for her, and pauses.

"What?" She's managed to calm herself and Rachel down enough to settle Rachel with her bottle.

"Do you want to get married?"

That's so far from anything she expected to hear tonight that her brain shorts out for a moment. She blinks rapidly a few times.

"I mean, someday," Alex follows up quickly. "Because I'd like to. Marry you. And I just want to make sure we're on the same page, so when I do ask for real I can make sure you're not drunk and staring at the tacos like you want them to go down on you."

"I am not –" Addison stops, because she _was_. "Okay maybe I am, but I guarantee you're better at it than the tacos." _Way_ better. She's actually torn between tacos and changing the direction of the evening entirely now that he's said that.

"I would hope so."

She stares at him for a moment – actually him and not the tacos he's still holding – and smiles. "Yeah," she says. She may be drunk, but she's never known anything so clearly before in her life. "I do."


	11. there's a fire in my heart, i know you like it like that

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a lot of fluff because this week has been lousy and I needed to write pure fluff or there was a non-zero chance I was going to throw a femur at someone's head on Monday.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Falling," Lyra
> 
> Also, I am moving and possibly _slightly_ projecting (lies; I am definitely projecting. Packing tape is The Worst).

“What the hell is a quarter bath?”

Addison looks up from her phone and a house with a truly bizarre bed-to-bath ratio. Nothing about it fits their criteria, but she’s fascinated. Her brow furrows. “I think it’s just a sink.”

“Nope,” Alex says after finding the photo. He turns his phone around so she can see.

“Why,” she says. “Why do people do this.” It’s a toilet. That’s all. And a towel bar, for a sink that’s nowhere to be found.

“I don’t know whether this is dumber, or the one with a pet door in a second floor bathroom.”

“Let’s call it a draw.”

Alex sets his phone down on the couch beside him. “I give up for the night,” he says, twisting to pop his back. “Everything’s starting to look the same.”

Addison feels much the same way, but there’s one more on her half of the list their agent sent this afternoon. She shifts, leaning against the arm of the couch and bringing her feet up to rest beside her. Alex mirrors her position and settles her legs in his lap, allowing her to stretch out. She smiles at him. He isn’t paying attention – he’s loading into Animal Crossing and Isabelle’s daily briefing – so she takes an extra moment just to watch him.

A year and a half ago, she was sitting in her office with a lab printout and a bottle of anti-nausea meds, without a clue in the world what her life was doing. Unmoored and adrift in her own storm, again. She still doesn’t know what her life is doing most days, and suspects she isn’t supposed to know, but at least there’s a picture in her mind. Her and Alex, Rachel, a third bedroom. A kitchen that’s maneuverable. A master bathroom with two sinks. Maybe a dog. One they can train to not eat her shoes.

Alex digs up a fossil and looks over at her. “What?”

“Nothing.”

He smiles and she melts a little. She goes back to the house listing and he goes back to the game.

Oh.

 _Oh_.

Four bedrooms, a reasonable number of bathrooms (and a reasonable number of fractions), the best kitchen she’s seen yet. A view of the Sound. A deck and a private yard. Built-in bookshelves. A walk-in closet she could do cartwheels in, if she could do a cartwheel. Sunlight streaming in through the windows. Hardwood.

“Hey,” she says softly. “Take a look,” she hands her phone to Alex and he hands her the controller.

She finishes the hunt for Wisp’s spirit fragments while Alex scrolls through photos.

“We need to see this one,” he says.

Smiling, she takes her phone back and emails their real estate agent.

***

They buy the house.

***

They've long settled into a two-week rotation, but for sanity and sense Rachel stays with Derek and Meredith for the entire month of June while Addison and Alex are moving and hip-deep in boxes.

Her first birthday rolls around two weeks before the move. Addison happily delegates party planning to Derek in favor of spending too much time swearing at packing tape. Derek enlists Meredith's and Amelia's help, they enlist Izzie and Callie, and together they throw a reasonably cohesive birthday party.

Rachel's too young to possibly understand why all the adults in her life are standing around in silly hats and singing, but she giggles and grins the entire day. After cake, when they're all sitting outside enjoying the summer air, she plays a made-up game of pulling the silly hats down over people's noses.

"She's a really happy kid," Derek says, leaning against the deck railing, watching Alex make funny faces at Rachel in Meredith's lap while Rachel shrieks in laughter.

Addison nods and takes a sip of her drink. "She is," she says quietly.

He follows her eyeline and she isn't looking at Rachel. She's looking at Alex. "You think he's the one, Addie? For real, this time."

The soft smile on her face says it all.

"I know he is."

He bumps her shoulder with his. All that history and all that mess and through it all Addison is still his friend. Her happiness matters as much as their daughter's does. "Good."

***

While Derek finishes loading the dishwasher – they went through plates today Meredith didn't even know they _owned_ – Meredith gets Rachel settled in for bed. Fresh diaper, cartoon dolphin onesie, an extremely boring lullaby playlist Derek curated playing softly through speakers. Rachel doesn't seem interested in sleeping.

Meredith doesn't blame her. She hates this playlist and would want to stay awake out of spite too. When she and Derek get around to having children of their own, _she's_ picking their kid's music. "Okay. Let's try something else." She silences the piano music and settles Rachel against her hip. She hums a few bars and then begins to sway. "Nice to meet you, where you been? I could show you incredible things."

Rachel bops her fists around to the tune. Meredith grins. Maybe it's not the best sleep-inducing music, but Rachel's happy. And that's the point. "Magic, madness, heaven, sin. Saw you there and I thought, oh my God, look at that face. You look like my next mistake. Love's a game, wanna play?"

She catches Rachel's hand for a moment and pretends to dance around the room. "New money, suit and tie, I could read you like a magazine." She does a little slow twirl, smiling when Rachel coos happily and settles her head on her shoulder. "Ain't it funny, rumors fly, and I know you heard about me."

Halfway through the spin, Meredith notices Derek standing at the doorway, a dreamy smile on his face. She dances the two of them over. "So hey, let's be friends, I'm dyin' to see how this one ends."

Derek raises an eyebrow. “Really?”

Meredith shrugs. “He who acapellas London Calling shall not judge the Taylor Swift,” she smiles. "Grab your passport and my hand," she steps up closer to him, "I can make the bad guys good for a weekend." She winks.

He lets out a strangled groan. "Please go to sleep," he says to Rachel.

Meredith and Rachel both laugh, though only Meredith knows why this is funny. Rachel sticks her tongue out in mimicry of one of the many funny faces she saw this afternoon, and it turns into a wide yawn. She settles her head sleepily on Meredith’s shoulder.

“You’re gonna get embarrassed if I’m standing here while you finish the song, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, you need to leave.”

Smiling, Derek kisses his daughter’s cheek and wishes her sweet dreams and then leaves Meredith to her singing.

***

Addison sets a box – _Dishes 2 of 4 (Glasses)_ – down on the counter and wipes rain from her eyes. At least the movers were almost done before the rain started an hour ago; they've since finished and left, and she and Alex are on their last run of random boxes from the condo, breakables and other oddities they didn't have the movers deal with. She exhales and watches raindrops slide down the windows.

All things considered, it's not even a bad rainstorm, it's just Seattle. But _moving_ in a normal Seattle rainstorm is an experience she honestly could've lived without. Thankfully the floors are hardwood. Mopping is easy. Hiring carpet cleaners is a pain.

"Could be worse," Alex observes, tightening his shoelace before he goes back out. "Moved into my med school apartment in a snowstorm. Two feet in twelve hours. Just me and one other guy and his girlfriend."

Addison looks at him sideways. "Wow," she deadpans. "Two feet in _twelve hours_." She pretends to look impressed for a moment as memories of a childhood in New England run through her mind. "I went trick-or-treating four years in a row in blizzards." Maybe not _technically_ blizzards, but to her small self it certainly felt like it. Seattle has grown on her, but she does miss the snow a bit. Though not on Halloween. Snowboots rather ruined the princess effect when she was eight.

He tilts his head. "I'm trying to imagine you trick-or-treating." He squints. "It's not working."

She rolls her eyes.

"It's not for lack of trying," he promises. "I just can't get there."

A moment passes while she debates whether to give him any ammunition or not. She decides it's better than him saying something offhand to Archer – who has been far more supportive than either of her parents about her life choices in the past three years, and who actually approves of Alex in a way that she finds important – and Archer digging up pictures. "Princess dresses and snowpants don't mix well."

His eyebrows raise. "Wow."

She sticks her tongue out. "I'm getting another box."

"Why am I not at all surprised you went as a princess," Alex says, following her.

Addison turns around just before opening the door to the rain. "I went as a devil a few times in college," she grins.

***

Carefully, so he doesn't disturb her sleep, Alex slides his arm out from under Addison. He kisses her cheek and slides out of bed. He makes his way downstairs to the kitchen by ambient light, and opens the fridge, unsure if he wants just a drink of water or a snack too.

"You know we have lights, right?"

Her voice startles him. Alex looks at her around the open refrigerator door. "I don't know where any of the switches are yet."

Addison bites back a smile, mostly unsuccessfully. "How many corners did you walk into on your way down here?"

His eyes shift sideways. His shins might be bruised in the morning. "Enough." He looks past her into the dark hallway. "You didn't turn any on either."

She makes a sheepish face. "You're not the only one who doesn't know where the light switches are."

Laughing, Alex pours them both a glass of water. Over the past two days, they've unpacked everything, rearranged furniture, and christened most of the rooms in their house. And the shower. Three times.

Addison reaches around him and pulls out the pizza box. Flipping it open, she sets it on the island and pulls out a piece from the pineapple side.

He takes a moment to stare at her, starry-eyed. Still a little sleepy, barefoot, in a pair of shorts and a Taylor Swift concert t-shirt. Eating cold pizza straight from the box, illuminated by nothing but the refrigerator light. Hair finger-combed into something halfway under control. Not two hours earlier and he had his head between her thighs as she writhed under him. Alex wouldn't mind getting back there sometime tonight, if she's interested.

A year and a half ago and he was just a sleep-deprived idiot taking a chance. And now, well. He might be Addison's lighthouse, but she is his. Maybe that's what love is. Lighthouses. He thinks about a ring.

She swallows. "What?"

He smiles. "Nothing." He leaves the refrigerator door open for light, leans against the island opposite her, and takes a piece from the non-pineapple side.

Addison looks at him, squinting a bit in the dark. "You're plotting," she says, pointing at him with her pizza.

In more ways than one. "Yep."


	12. i can't remember when the earth turned slowly

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> very important conversations!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Spinning," Jack's Mannequin

The next year comes and goes in a whirlwind.

Derek and Meredith get married (on a Post-It, which both Addison and Mark give Derek not an inconsequential amount of grief about). Rachel starts walking and talking and turns two (and gets a Little Mermaid-themed birthday party, as her hair has shifted red and she loves Flounder), and lives mostly with Addison and Alex for stability. Alex switches focus to Pediatrics (Mark has a new apprentice in the form of Jackson Avery and gets over the loss quickly). Meredith makes Chief Resident (Alex high-fives her and is the only one to ever turn his paperwork in on time). And Addison properly introduces Alex to her parents; to her surprise, much of their judgment about her life has softened and they even seem to like Alex (she suspects Rachel’s presence helps immensely and isn’t above using her toddler for brownie points).

Life, for the first time since that fateful night in the trailer, seems to be finding it’s rhythm.

***

_AK: fyi power's out_

_AM: here too; we're running on generators. gonna be a lot longer than I thought_

_AK: do they need me there?_

_AM: no, we're good. Don't wait up_

_AK: love you_

_AM:_ 💖

***

Rachel wakes up with a start, thrown out of her scary dream and into her silent and darkened room. She's long learned to tune out rain beating on her window in the night, but sometimes thunder works its way into her dreams.

The rainbow nightlight in the corner is fading, normally bright all the way through morning. Lightning flashes outside and in its wake distorted shadows flicker across her room. Another clap of thunder booms outside.

Whimpering, Rachel clings tight to Bear and clenches her eyes closed. Three more flashes of lightning – so quick there's hardly space for thunder between them – and she decides to run from the shadows. She's careful to jump off her bed, not climb off. She lands far enough away to avoid the monsters underneath who want to grab her ankles and drag her into their lair. With Bear clutched to her chest, she pulls her door open and makes her way down the hallway. Thunder crashes almost overhead. She lets out a little shriek and dashes past the open bathroom door and to the end of the hall.

The door stands open just a crack and Rachel pushes it open enough to slip inside. There's only one person inside the bed. Based on the shadow, he isn't who she was hoping for. But he still gives really good hugs. She steps toward the bed and puts her hand on Alex's arm.

Half-awake already from the storm, Alex squeezes his eyes shut tightly once more before opening them completely. He turns his head and looks straight into the worried eyes of his girlfriend's daughter. "You okay?" It's a pretty dumb question. She's two and there's a wild thunderstorm that knocked out power to half the city. He reaches out to hold her hand and his watch lights up: 3:42am.

"Where's Mommy?" Rachel sniffles and a tear trickles down her cheek. Adults don't have monsters under their beds, it's a rule. But she's still nervous standing so close to the bed in the dark.

Alex sits up just enough to lean over and lift Rachel up into the bed. She immediately scrambles into his lap and buries her head in his shoulder. "Someone's mom needed her help," he says, wrapping his arms tight around the small girl. Addison got the call to come in after Rachel was asleep. Thunder rolls from one boom to another and another and Rachel starts to cry. "I've got you," he promises, brushing a kiss to the top of her head.

She cuddles in closer, tucking herself into a ball in his arms.

“You're safe." He holds her close and tight, rubbing her back as she cries herself out.

Rachel lifts her head and hiccups. She giggles at the sound.

Alex wipes away a few tears and then offers her a tissue for her nose. "Blow," he says. She does and he tosses it into the small trash can by their bed.

"No monsters?" she asks hopefully.

He smiles. "No more monsters."

"Okay." She leans her head on his shoulder again, this time with a yawn.

"Want to go back to bed?"

She blinks a few times. "Here?"

He honestly didn't expect her to want to go back to her own bed, not when the storm's still raging outside. "Sure." Alex lifts up the blankets and waits for her to get comfortable before he lies down. He opens his arms and Rachel immediately burrows deeper into the covers and his welcoming hug. "Love you, Rach," he says with a kiss to her forehead. "Sweet dreams." He wishes sweet dreams to Bear too, earning a smile from Rachel.

Within minutes, she's sound asleep in his arms.

***

Addison quietly shuts the door behind her and sags against it, eyes closed. "You are not allowed to pass out right here," she tells herself. "No." It takes another minute to really convince herself of that statement.

She stands up, hanging her purse and jacket beside Alex's coat and Rachel's backpack. She kicks off her shoes somewhere generally out of the way. The couch looks awfully enticing. Almost too exhausted to make it up the stairs, she heavily considers just sleeping on the couch, but she remembers that she's too tall for the couch and upstairs also means Alex. She trudges upstairs.

The faint motion-activated nightlights they have in the hallways stay dark as she passes. She had to park outside the garage, but at least the hospital had regained power before she left. Making quick work of her clothes, she slips back into the pajamas she'd left haphazardly folded on the hall bathroom sink.

Yawning, she brushes her teeth again. The coffee Callie handed to her when she got to the hospital eight hours ago doesn't taste so great now, no matter how much gum she chewed on the drive home. Bleary-eyed and genuinely about to fall over _right there_ , she shuffles sleepily down the hall to their bedroom.

A flash of lightning briefly illuminates the room, just enough to show the sight in front of her. Addison smiles. Though every cell in her body is demanding that she walk forward, crawl into bed, and _go to sleep_ , she stands silently at the door for a moment longer. She wants to capture the image of her boyfriend snuggling her daughter protectively in his arms. Rachel's head is tucked safely under his chin, both of them soundly asleep.

Finally giving in after a third yawn, Addison slips under the covers next to Alex and gently slides an arm over his waist. Spooning around him, she props her head up and lightly brushes a curl out of Rachel's face. "I want one with you," she whispers to Alex and kisses his cheek, her mind finally made up about the question he's never asked and the conversation they keep meaning to have. "I love you."

Alex feels her lie down and cuddle up against him. He smiles, barely brought out of his sleep by her climbing into bed, but enough to hear her words.

***

Rachel wakes up first, the sunny Saturday morning sun casting just enough light to land on her eyes. Noticing her mother's hand on her arm _– finally_ – she wriggles out of Alex's arms. She scrambles over him, elbowing him in the ribs as she does so. Alex opens one eye just in time to dodge a knee to the face and turns over, helping Rachel the rest of the way; he’s used to random toddler-induced bruises, but that doesn’t mean he wants them. Addison, barely awake, smiles at her daughter and lets Rachel cuddle up close.

He watches the two redheads both quickly fall back asleep.

Alex remembers the first time Addison told him she loved him. It was like getting hit by the best possible kind of train. And none of the little things they fight about – not about how to load a dishwasher, not about whether pineapple belongs on pizza, not about circling the parking lot to find a pull-through space – matter one iota against that train.

 _Not this one's father_.

_I want one with you._

A smile grows across his face as he watches the two of them sleep in the warm morning sun. That train just keeps rolling.

***

After being on her feet for nine hours and, thanks to a breech birth and an uncooperative fetal heartbeat, now three hours overdue for lunch, Addison sighs in relief as her office door shuts behind her and leaves her in silence.

She steps out of her shoes, pulls her lunch out of the mini-fridge and falls ungracefully onto the couch. There's a cheery bright yellow Post-It lying on top of her salad. She smiles. Alex sometimes leaves her notes, reminding her to breathe or to smile or that he loves her (or, occasionally, the beginning of a joke one of his patients told him; the punch line is usually buried at the bottom of her lunch bag). She keeps every one of them in an envelope in her top desk drawer.

The usually make her grin and laugh, or smile and shake her head (or groan; kid humor is often _terrible_ ), but this one takes her breath away.

 _I want one with you, too._ ♥

"I thought you were asleep," Addison whispers to the note.

A thoughtful smile quirks at her lips at the idea that someone _wants_ to have kids with her. Derek loves Rachel, but Rachel was an accident; there isn't any way around that.

But Alex, Alex wants kids _with her_.

She texts him.

Alex knocks lightly a few minutes later and then enters. She's still staring at the note, though she has managed to take a few bites of her salad. She looks up at him and turns the note around so he can see.

“I do,” he says.

Addison wonders how many times he had to rewrite the note to get everything just right. How many times he rewrote those few words so his hand wouldn't shake as he shared such an intimate wish through something as simple as a Post-It note. She smiles. "So do I."

Alex smiles in return and is three steps away from her when his phone buzzes at him with a reminder that he needs to scrub in. "Sorry," he says with an apologetic frown.

Addison shakes her head, still smiling. "We'll talk tonight," she says quietly. She returns Alex's quick kiss and waves as he disappears out the door.

***

Sitting on a stool at the island, Addison watches Alex make dinner at the same time as he talks about kids and how he wants them, but he's never liked calling it “planning” a family because plans get stressful. Most of the big life plans she’s made in the last three years have gone off the rails inside of two months, so she's on board with that logic. But Alex is spiraling; not in the way she does when panic takes hold or she goes too far down a Twitter black hole, but he’s talking around himself in circles.

When he grabs a third cucumber to chop for a meal that only needs one, Addison realizes she needs to throw him a life raft. With a glance to the living room – Rachel’s still happily entertained by her tower of blocks – she hops off the stool and puts a finger to his lips. "How about," she suggests, "I get the IUD taken out, and we…see what happens?"

It’s the opposite of planning. It’s the anti-plan. But it’s _their_ kind of planning. 

"Yeah?" he gently kisses her finger.

Nodding, she softly strokes his cheek. "Yeah. No pressure, no planning, just letting life happen how it wants. If we need plans along the way,” and she’s fully aware that they might, but that’s not this conversation, “we can make them then."

Alex puts the knife down and slips his arm around her waist. He draws her to him, now much steadier than he was even thirty seconds ago. A rock. Confident. "We," he says with his lips hovering just over hers, "are going to have the most beautiful children."

He kisses her and Addison thinks plans are the stupidest thing in the world.

***

Two months later, a few days after Halloween, Addison sleepily rolls over. Even asleep she expects to find Alex beside her, but finds air instead. It wakes her up.

Frowning, she checks the video baby monitor on her nightstand. Rachel’s sound asleep, Bear tucked tightly in her arms. There’s no note either, like they leave if they have to leave in the middle of the night. She waits a while, but hears none of the sounds of someone having gotten up to use the bathroom. Besides, their bathroom door is wide open.

Finally confused enough – and a little concerned – Addison gets out of bed. She grabs a sweatshirt and pulls it over her head against the autumn chill. Baby monitor in hand just in case, and she goes to find her boyfriend.

She doesn’t encounter any lights, but the full moon outside is enough to illuminate her way. He’s not upstairs or in the kitchen or living room or out on the deck, and she’s beginning to get worried. The basement door is ajar, which is odd: they usually keep it closed so Rachel doesn’t tumble down the stairs. She heads downstairs, bare feet over carpet, to the space they haven’t figured out what to do with yet.

And there, finally, she finds Alex: sitting outside on the lower patio in the moonlight, elbows resting on his knees. Addison frowns. All of this is strange.

She knocks lightly on the glass door, whispering an apology he can’t hear when the noise startles him slightly, and steps outside into the cool clear moonlight. The concrete is cold beneath her feet and she regrets not putting on socks. “Hey,” she says, sitting next to him on the bench. She sets the baby monitor beside her.

“Hey,” he repeats, wrapping an arm around her shoulders.

“What are you doing out here?”

“Thinking,” he says.

There’s a strange undertone to his voice that tells her not to make a teasing comment. “About what?” she says instead.

A pause. “What if I’m not a good dad?” he says quietly.

Addison’s brow furrows. He’ll be amazing – he’s already amazing with Rachel – and there’s no doubt in her mind. She’s seen him put kids hardly older than Rachel at ease with just a smile. “Alex,” she starts and tries to turn and face him, but his arm tightens around her. Not enough to restrain, but enough to get the point across. He doesn’t want eye contact right now.

“My dad. He uh. He hit my mom. A lot. And me. Especially when I got big enough to try to stand up for her.” He stops. A breeze blows past and a few crisp leaves from the maple tree slowly float to the ground.

Addison laces their fingers together and gives him a slight squeeze.

“I hit him back,” Alex continues. “Every time he’d hit her, I’d jump between them and hit him back. One day he just left. Got tired of us, I guess. Found someone to hit who wouldn’t fight back.”

An owl hoots somewhere in the neighborhood. Addison tugs his arm tighter around her, sensing that Alex needs to hug something. He holds her against his chest.

“What if I’m…what if I’m like that. Like him. You know?”

Addison tries to turn again and this time he lets her. It could just be the moonlight and shadows, but he looks haunted. “You are a good man, Alex Karev,” she says, never so sure of seven words in her life. “You are a good man. You are a fantastic parent to my daughter and you will be an amazing father to our children.”

His breath shakes and he looks past her into the darkness.

“You are not your father, Alex.”

“Yeah,” he breathes, barely audible.

Addison shifts, settling her arms around his shoulders. “You try to hide it sometimes, but you’re the kindest person I know. You care so deeply – about me, about Rachel, your friends, your patients. You are not your father.”

Alex finally looks at her. There’s something deeply scared in his eyes that breaks her heart.

Wind flutters through the fallen leaves around them, rustling through the night.

Addison rests her forehead against his. “This I know: you are a good man. You are a kind man. And you’re gonna be a great dad, Alex.”

He doesn’t say anything, but the tension starts to leave his body. 

“I love you,” he says after a while. The desperation in his voice is fading.

“I love you too,” she says, tightening her embrace.

Gradually they shift, her back against his chest, his arms around her waist, their fingers tangled together over her stomach. It's not so cold wrapped up together like this. They sit in silence as the full moon slowly travels across the sky.

“Will you marry me?” Alex asks.

Addison twists around to look at him. There’s a smile on his face, bright enough to rival the moon.

“The ring’s upstairs, but this is me asking. No tacos in sight. Will you marry me?”

She’s sure the smile on her face is just as bright. “Yes.”


	13. ringing joyful and triumphant

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> wedding planning (and a cranky toddler)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "I Hear the Bells," Mike Doughty
> 
> [26 August note: quick update/note to say that I am in the middle of moving and life is chaos; I’ll be back to writing once I have a desk again!]

“St. Augustine?”

Addison looks up from a book of color palettes and a laptop with what looks like a thousand tabs open for dresses. How she’s doing both _and_ holding a cranky Rachel – who hasn’t settled since dinner and will only be soothed by her mother’s arms – at the same time baffles him.

She blinks. “We _just_ watched that episode of BuzzFeed Unsolved.”

 _That’s_ why it’s been in his head all day. “You mean you don’t want to get married in a haunted lighthouse?” Alex grins.

“Wouldn’t be in my top ten, no. Okay,” she directs this to her daughter, now squirming and trying to use both Addison and the kitchen table as a climbing gym, “ _what_ is your deal tonight?” she asks, though her voice is nothing but kindness.

“Snack!” Rachel proclaims loudly as she slides off Addison’s lap to stand beside her. 

Addison shakes her head. “It’s almost bedtime.”

“I want snack,” she says.

“You had dinner.”

Alex bites the inside of his cheek and tamps down a smile. Watching Addison argue with a two year-old is fascinating. He knows Rachel’s current defiance drives her crazy, but she seems so unbothered.

Rachel scrunches her face up. “Cookies.”

“No.”

She puts her hands on her hips in an eerily accurate imitation of her mother. “I want cookies!” she demands.

“Okay,” Addison decides. “Bedtime.”

Rachel blinks. “No!” she screams before she runs out of the kitchen, feet pounding on the hardwood.

Addison stands to go chase after her. “Some animals eat their young,” she sighs.

Alex snorts. “You want help?”

There’s a loud thud, the distinct sound of a wound-up toddler tripping over her own feet and falling. Not half a second passes before Rachel starts to cry.

Addison winces and then shakes her head. “I got it.”

Alex opens yet another article – _Six Lighthouse Venues That Will Take Your Breath Away!_ – as Addison goes to investigate.

“This is why we don’t run in socks,” Addison says from the other room, clearly having found Rachel. Her calm voice filters through her daughter’s cries as she soothes Rachel.

After a few minutes, Addison comes back in the kitchen, Rachel settled on her hip. “Say goodnight,” she quietly encourages a still-slightly-teary Rachel.

“Night, Alex,” Rachel sniffles, lifting her head from Addison’s shoulder.

He smiles at the girl. “Sweet dreams, Rach.”

Rachel yawns and sleepily sets her head back down on her mother’s shoulder as Addison carries her out of the kitchen and upstairs to bed. He gives her a little wave.

Alex closes the article; he has all six open already. They’ve narrowed it down to Beach and Lighthouse. Which, as his current open Chrome tabs attest to, doesn’t actually narrow it down much. He’s had to flip between two tabs more times than he’ll admit in order to remember which one is in Massachusetts and which one is in California. He switches over to YouTube and a speedrun of Breath Of The Wild he’s been trying to watch for a few days.

“Terrible twos can bite me,” Addison mutters as she comes back down half an hour later.

“You sure you want another one?” Alex asks, closing the video as it finishes.

“Right now I don’t,” she grumbles, opening the pantry. She stares for a moment. “Do we even _have_ cookies?”

“Top shelf behind the cereal. Secret Oreos.”

Addison lifts up on her toes and finds it behind a box of Cheerios. “You’re a godsend.”

“I have my moments.” He smiles at her as she leans on the counter opposite him. “How’s the diva?”

“Bumped her elbow. She’ll live. And she only wanted _Goodnight Moon_ three times tonight, so.” She splits an Oreo in half and eats the non-icing side first.

He groans. It’s been six months of nothing but that book. “I think I have it memorized.”

Nodding, Addison eats the other half of her cookie. “We need to figure something else out before all four of us lose our minds.” She takes another cookie and nudges the pack toward him. “Anyway. How goes the search?”

He takes one. “East Coast or West Coast?” Looking at half the country is bound to be easier than the whole country.

Addison thinks on that for a moment. “West is easier to get to. West?”

“West,” he agrees, and closes half the tabs. Definitely easier.

***

Three weeks later and they've decided on a location.

“Alright,” Addison says as she stares at their potential guest list spread out on the kitchen counter in front of them. Some names are scribbled out, others added in the margins, and she’s pretty sure Callie’s on there five times. “I’m not just saying this because of the awkwardness of inviting exes who are also friends.”

Or exes who are her daughter’s father. Or exes who are her daughter’s godfather. She went to Meredith’s and Derek’s reception after their city hall wedding. It was only a little weird and Addison does not want to admit that Derek had a good idea by not inviting people to the ceremony.

“But it’s because of the awkwardness of inviting exes who are also friends.” Alex frowns at the cake sample in front of him and, though he finishes the bite, pushes it away.

She nods and dumps the sample – Black Forest, which didn’t scream wedding to start with and also had way too much kirsch in it – in the trash. “Yep.” She’s not the only one with friend-exes on the list.

“If you’re about to suggest eloping, I am all in.”

“Oh, thank god,” she exhales. It isn’t that she doesn’t want to put in the work or money for wedding planning, she absolutely would if he wants to, it’s –

“All I want to do is marry you,” Alex voices her thought. “I don’t care if anyone’s there or if we have white roses or light blue or whatever.” He reaches out over the counter and laces his fingers with hers. Her engagement ring sparkles in the light. 

Every time she thinks she can’t smile any harder because of the man in front of her, he says something like that. "Let's do it," she says, squeezing his hand. "Just us."

***

Another month and Addison has a dress, Alex has a suit, and they have rings.

Alex finally crosses paths with her after lunch. “Hey,” he says, lightly grabbing Addison’s arm and spinning her back the other direction to a hallway that isn’t as crowded.

“Alex, what?” She stares at him a little confused as she shifts gears from Patient Focus to Fiancée Focus.

“So I called the place,” he says, wrapping back to a conversation they had over breakfast. “We’re not locked into the May date yet. And they had a cancellation, so there’s an opening in three weeks as long as we don’t need, yknow, full Wedding Stuff.”

“Which we don’t.” She pulls out her phone and opens her calendar. “Rachel’s with Derek that week.”

He nods; all four of them share that calendar and it was the first thing he checked. Derek would take Rachel if Addison asked, but keeping her on a schedule is best for everyone and it’s one less thing to wrangle. “Yep.”

Addison looks up at him over her glasses, smiling. “Want to go on vacation in three weeks and get married along the way?”

His thoughts exactly. “I’ll figure out plane tickets and hotel if you figure out an officiant and photographer?” Getting a photographer on such short notice is going to be tough, but Addison always seems to know someone.

“Deal.” She gives him a quick kiss. “I’ve gotta scrub in, but I’ll see you later.”

A brief look up and down the hallway to confirm they’re alone and Alex pulls her in for a deeper kiss. Still quick – they both have things to get to that do not include making out in the surgical floor hallway – but _damn_. He can’t believe he gets to marry her. And he doesn't even have to wait much longer.

***

_AM: Hey are you still in San Francisco?_

_VR: For another month, yeah. Why?_

_AM: the ordination you did for Naomi and Sam, any chance that's still valid?_

_VR: It is! You two need my services?_ 😉

_AM: We do!_

_VR: You got it. When’s the date?_

_AM: Three weeks from Thursday_

_VR: …_

_VR: is this a shotgun thing?_

_AM: No._

_AM: We just want a small thing. Just us._

_VR: Tell me when and where to be and I’ll show up._

***

Rachel’s happily coloring at the table – paying no attention to lines – while Addison finishes up paperwork. Both of them look up at the knock on Addison’s office door.

“Come in,” Addison calls.

Miranda sticks her head in, Tuck visible in her arms. And then Izzie. And then Callie. And then Amelia.

Addison takes her glasses off. She’s not going to get any more work done, not with the looks on their faces.

“We want to throw you a bachelorette party,” Izzie says, sitting in one of the chairs.

“No.” She shakes her head. Some days she thinks she’s still working off the hangover she got from her bachelorette party before marrying Derek.

Miranda sets Tuck down by Rachel and her crayons before sitting in the other chair opposite Izzie. For a moment, the look on her daughter’s face as Tuck reaches for the blue crayon makes Addison think she’ll need to intervene, but Rachel just pushes the other coloring book toward him and keeps using her purple. She sighs in relief. They’ve been working on sharing.

Amelia sits on the floor beside her niece and gives Rachel a little hug. Rachel immediately scrambles into her lap and continues coloring. “Come on, Addie.”

Callie takes the couch. “You’re not letting us in on the big day. At least let us throw you a party.”

“First of all. You,” she points at Callie, “ran off to Vegas and didn’t tell me until afterward. And second of all, there’s a whole reception you’re all invited to.” Invitations went out two weeks ago; she and Alex keep getting handed RSVP cards despite the return envelopes they included.

“It’s two months later,” Izzie says.

“Take it up with venue scheduling.” She looks at Miranda. “Are you part of this?”

Miranda shakes her head. “Get married however you want. And I am not wearing a penis necklace – ”

“Neither am I,” Addison cuts in. She thinks Savvy might still have a few somewhere.

“But your friends,” she gestures at the four of them, “don’t get to celebrate the actual day with you and want to throw you a party.”

“Separately from the one with cake you’re throwing for yourself,” Callie says, now sitting on the floor and coloring with the two toddlers and Amelia.

They have a point. And if any of them eloped (again, in Callie’s case), she thinks she’d want to throw them a party too. “Okay. But please nothing that involves the words _jello shots_.”

***

While this conversation is happening, a similar one is happening on the opposite side of the floor in a scrub room.

“I don’t really have a choice in this, do I?” Alex asks, tying his scrub cap up.

“Nope,” Meredith says, turning on the faucet.

Arizona finishes pulling her hair back, dons her scrub cap, and steps up to the sink. “Not at all.”

Alex shrugs. “Sure.” He hadn’t imagined himself getting married until the last couple of years, so any concept of bachelor party is limited to ones he’s attended. A moment passes. “But if there’s a strip club involved, I’ll pass.”

***

_AK: how's your party?_

_AM: [selfie at a restaurant, Miranda, Callie, and Amelia in the background. Addison's waving and toasting the camera with champagne]_

_AM: yours?_

_AK: [image of Arizona grilling on their deck, Meredith and George sitting on the railing, Cristina visible through the window in the kitchen]_

_AK: [second image, a selfie of him toasting the camera with a bottle of beer]_

_AK: Izzie just left, she's on her way_

_AM: still think she's nuts for trying to do both of these_

_AK: she's determined when she wants to be_

_AM: we get on a plane in 48 hours._

_AK: we do_ 😊

_AM: this is Amelia now. We’re stealing Addison’s phone for the rest of the night. She loves you very much and will see you at home later for lots of sex. Bye!_

_AK: lol. Bye, Amelia_

***

"Okay," Addison says as Alex puts his suitcase in the car next to hers. "Dress," she points to it hanging in the back. "Suit," she points to the other hanger. "Both rings are in my purse," she checks just to make sure. "Anything else, we can buy when we get there."

Alex looks at her over the car. "You ready?"

She grins. "Let's get married."


	14. all's well that ends well to end up with you

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> in which there is a wedding!

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Lover," Taylor Swift
> 
> also, we're back! i moved and it was chaos, but we're back!

Waves crash on the cliffs below and gulls squawk overhead in the clear brilliant blue sky. Alex smiles as their rental car drives up and parks. He took an Uber over earlier so they could have a first look moment somewhere other than their hotel room with all its scattered clothes. The photographer’s assistant has been taking a lot of images of Alex staring out at the ocean, which has become a little weird, so he’s happy for Addison’s arrival for more than one reason.

Tori gets out of the front and opens the back door for Addison. First he sees white, and then a flash of leg. And then she stands and damn.

 _Damn_.

Two years ago, he didn’t know it was possible for him to love someone so much that his heart instantly fills with joy the moment he set his eyes on her. He’d seen it in his friends and he’d seen it in movies, but doubted he’d ever have it for himself. In fact, he went to great lengths to avoid any part of it just so he wouldn’t be disappointed. But then Addison’s storm crashed into his and hell if they’re not going to keep the lanterns lit.

Wind blows softly through Addison’s loose red curls as she reaches him. A simple bouquet of wildflowers sits in her hands. Her eyes are warm and kind and so full of love, as they always are, and today there’s an extra sparkle.

He’s quite literally speechless.

She does a little twirl for him. The strapless dress dips low in the back, tied by some half-corset thing he doesn’t immediately see a way to undo, and hugs her waist and hips before draping elegantly to the floor. There’s a little sparkle in the lace overlay. Her makeup is soft and glamorous, and simple diamond earrings glitter as she moves.

“Holy shit,” he says.

Addison laughs and ducks her head. “You’re not so bad yourself,” she says, drawing her fingers down the lapel of his grey suit jacket.

He’s idly aware of photographers frantically clicking away, but Addison is his only focus. Wind rustles through the dune grass. He clasps her hand and strokes his thumb over her knuckles. On impulse, he lifts her hand to his lips and gently kisses her fingers.

“Okay,” Tori says quietly, “let’s give them a moment." She corrals the photographers and encourages them toward the ceremony site. "Let us know when you’re on your way," she says, grinning at the two of them before she leaves them alone.

***

Addison gets out of the car and there are no butterflies.

She had butterflies the whole week leading up to her wedding to Derek. They weren’t bad butterflies, just uncertain. New. Nervous. She was supposed to have butterflies. Everyone told her butterflies were normal and so she had butterflies. 

But as Addison gets out of the car and sees Alex standing above the sea, her breath catches in her throat and it isn’t butterflies. It’s adoration and joy. The only other time in her life another person has ever looked so right was the moment Izzie placed Rachel in her arms for the first time.

“Breathe,” Tori reminds her as she shuts the car door.

A soft smile settles on Addison’s lips. She’s never breathed easier.

Alex is looking at her a little starry-eyed. Addison gives him a twirl when she reaches him. She loves this dress and doesn’t care at all that it already has sand in the hem.

“Holy shit,” he whispers.

Addison laughs. “You’re not so bad yourself.” His grey suit is tailored _perfectly_. Silver cufflinks glint in the sunlight and his deep emerald green tie matches her nails.

Tori gets the photographers to leave them alone for a moment (which Addison knows really means they’ll be swapping out for a zoom lens) and then it’s just the two of them.

She catches his hand after he kisses hers and steps forward, clasping their hands together over her heart. Alex leans his forehead against hers and her eyes flutter closed. Salt air gently blows around them. 

He's _the_ guy indeed.

“Let’s get married,” Alex says after a few moments, brushing a kiss to her forehead.

Addison smiles and takes a step back, still holding his hand. “Let’s get married.”

Hand in hand, they walk toward the lighthouse. It stands tall and strong, sending its guiding light out to sea, a reminder of the beacon of hope they are for each other.

***

Both of them cry a little during their vows.

Neither of the two lighthouse event staff serving as witnesses have any objection to their marriage.

Their rings are simple silver bands, hammered so light bounces off the metal. _In any given storm_ is engraved inside both – their promise to each other, to be the lighthouse, the light. Safe harbor no matter the weather.

They kiss for the first time as husband and wife and it's _magical_.

***

The sand is warm beneath her bare feet, Alex's hand – her _husband’s_ hand – warm in hers, and the sun is warm on her skin. Everything is warm. Everything is _good_.

Addison doesn't know that she's ever been so happy. The setting sun glitters golden against the ocean waves. Water laps at her bare feet, catching at the edge of her dress. There's a photographer somewhere, documenting their post-vows walk on the beach, but all she’s focused on is Alex.

Alex beside her. Alex’s hand in hers. Alex saying _I do_. Alex, utterly in love with her as much as she’s in love with him.

This is right. He’s right. _They’re_ right.

Alex pauses and pulls her toward him, his hand solid and warm on her back. His thumb brushes against the bare skin just above her dress. A moment passes, staring at each other in the sunset, and then their lips crash together like the ocean waves around them. His fingers tangle in her hair as hers slide up his arms to his shoulders. He dips her backward just a little. The whole world washes away.

Alex's hands drop to hers and he leads her a few steps into the water, a little higher than their knees. Addison remembers the photographer talking about a few shots in the water (especially after she made it clear she didn’t mind if her dress got wet) and she smiles. His hands drift back to her hips, then down to her thighs, and he encourages her up. With a little jump, she wraps her legs tight around his waist. She cups his cheeks, smiling down at him as the sun hovers red and golden just at the horizon. "I love you so much," she whispers before kissing him again.

Alex holds her strong and steady as they kiss amidst the waves. His fingers dance along the damp fabric covering her thighs, making her shudder.

As she kisses her husband in the ocean, Addison thinks that life can't get any better.

***

Later, when they’re back in Seattle and looking at all the photos, that will be their favorite one. Blue waves around them. Alex’s hands high on her wet dress covered thighs as her legs surround his waist. Addison’s hair lit up like embers in the dying sun. Her hands on his cheeks, kissing him like there’s no tomorrow. The train of her dress swirling in the water below. The very end of the sunset exploding the sky in reds and purples and golds and pinks.

They’ll leave it out of the slideshow that plays at their reception, but it is framed in their bedroom.

***

After dinner and another walk on the beach (this time with dry clothes and zero photographers), Alex shuts and locks the hotel room door behind them. He catches Addison around her waist and pulls her close. “Hello, gorgeous,” he murmurs, kissing a spot just behind her ear. He feels her breath hitch and he does it again.

Addison _hmm_ s and curls her hand around the nape of his neck. Her fingers tease through his hair as he trails tiny kisses across her shoulder. She presses herself up against him, molding against his body.

Alex's hands slide underneath the short black dress she changed into for dinner, pushing the fabric up to her hips. His fingers ghost over her bare thighs and Addison breaks the kiss to gasp. Alex chases her lips as she unbuttons his shirt and pushes it off his shoulders. Grinning, Alex tugs his undershirt up over his head, throwing it behind him, and groans when Addison's hands settle on his chest.

“Zipper?” Alex asks breathily between kisses. His fingers tease at the edge of her panties and he needs her dress _off_.

“There isn’t one,” she breathes against his lips. “Just pull it off.”

He does. He breaks the kiss barely long enough to tug the dress up and over her head. It lands somewhere near his shirt. Grinning, Alex takes a moment to drink in his wife standing before him in just a lacy black bra and matching panties. And heels.

He swallows. _Fuck_. How did he get so damn lucky.

Addison quirks an eyebrow. “Enjoying the view?” Her hands slowly trail down his bare chest. She hooks her fingers into his belt loops and tugs him forward for another searing kiss.

“Always,” he murmurs. Wrapping one strong arm around her shoulders, he steps backward and pulls them both down to the bed. Addison grins above him. Without missing a beat, Alex unhooks her bra one-handed and buries the other in her hair, kissing her thoroughly as she takes her bra the rest of the way off.

It’s far from the first time he’s made love to Addison. But it’s the first time he’s made love to his _wife_. And that, Alex thinks as he slides her panties over her hips, is certainly something.

***

Two months later and Addison isn't sure she's stopped smiling since she got out of the car at the lighthouse. They stand in front of their friends and family at their reception. They’ve heard wonderful speeches from Meredith (acting as Alex's best man) and Callie (acting as Addison's maid of honor) and very nearly heard one from Archer (who had just enough champagne with dinner, and who was bullied into silence by Izzie stepping on his foot with her stiletto). Their first dance is not technically their first, not even as a married couple, but some traditions are worth keeping. And they’re about to cut cake before letting everyone loose on the dance floor and open bar.

But just after they've cut the cake, before they have a chance to even lift their forks, Addison catches sight of Rachel running up toward them.

"Mommy! Cake!" Rachel proclaims loudly.

"Sorry!" Derek whispers loudly, sneaking up to catch her again.

Laughing, Addison just smiles. Rachel's hard to hold onto when she gets wiggly.

"Hey Rach," Alex says, catching the girl's attention. He sneaks some icing from his piece of cake and swipes it onto Rachel's nose.

Rachel giggles, oblivious to the room laughing at her interruption, and tries lick the icing off her nose. It does not work.

"Upstaged by my own kid," Addison shakes her head. She bends down and kisses Rachel's cheek. "Go back to Daddy, okay? You'll get cake in a minute," she whispers.

"Okay!" Rachel happily skips off back to Derek, who lifts her up and shows her an easier way to get icing off her nose.

Once cake is on its way to everyone (and she's flagged a waitstaff member to make sure Rachel gets cake _first_ ), Addison takes the mic and stands. "Thank you everyone for coming," she says. "I don't have a speech planned," she admits, "but I know some of you were disappointed you didn't get to spend the actual day with us. And I wanted to say thank you for understanding that we wanted to get married our way. And I," she looks over at Alex, who's looking back at her like she's the sun.

The rest of the room disappears and again it's just him.

"Marrying you that day on the beach was one of the best days of my life. I love you."

Alex stands and kisses her. Addison squeaks a little in surprise, glad Callie has taken the mic out of her hand so no one except Alex hears it, and wraps her arms around his shoulders. Alex dips her low to the sound of cheers and applause and a few wolf whistles. She trails her hand over his shoulder and rests her fingers on his cheek.

(And _that's_ their favorite picture from the reception. Alex's arm strong and low on her back. Addison's back arched in a perfect curve. Her short, white, long-sleeved dress contrasting against his black shirt and white tie. Light glittering off her rings.

Alex is particularly pleased with how gorgeous Addison's legs look in that dress and that pose. Addison is particularly pleased with how well she can see Alex's muscles even through his shirt.

They get it printed in black and white and it sits on their dresser next to the picture from the beach.)

Alex pulls them back up and bumps his forehead against hers for a brief moment before taking the mic. "Uh, what she said," he says as their friends laugh. "Enjoy the bar and the dancing, everyone. Thanks for coming."


	15. into this house we're born

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Riders on the Storm," The Doors

Six months after the wedding and Addison thinks the only thing that would make her happier is if her daughter would listen to quite literally any other book at bedtime.

"I'm gonna run that book through the shredder," she says, collapsing onto the couch beside Alex.

"In the great green room, there was a telephone," Alex starts. "And a red balloon, and a picture of – "

He's abruptly cut off by Addison throwing a pillow at him. Laughing, Alex sets the pillow aside and tugs her to him.

Addison settles against his chest. She has the book memorized too. She's pretty sure all four of them do. All five of them – Addison can't imagine a reality where her daughter doesn't have _Goodnight, Moon_ memorized, even at the age of three. "There's a whole bookshelf in there," she muses. "Plenty of books. Plenty of _different_ books. And that's the one she wants. _Every. Night._ "

"How many times have you read _Jane Eyre_?"

"That's not the point." She's lost count and isn't about to admit that Rachel's laser focus on a single book might be genetic.

"I got about three pages into _Dragons Love Tacos_ the other night," Alex says. "I think we're all screwed until she can read on her own."

Addison pulls her husband's arm tighter around her and cuddles into him. He's probably right. At least it'll make Christmas easy this year: instead of everyone asking if she already has the book they want to give her, Addison can just send out a blanket _no books_ message.

"Is it possible to have a _book_ stuck in your head?" Alex asks after a moment. "Because I do."

Addison sits up and flashes him a grin. "You're the one who started quoting it."

"I know," he groans.

The grin turns into a smirk as she shifts slightly, straddling his waist. "We could do something else," she says, raising a suggestive eyebrow. "Take your mind off of kittens and mittens."

Alex's eyes darken and his lips form a little smirk of their own. He settles his hands on her hips. "Have I ever mentioned how much I love how your brain works?"

She shrugs coyly. "Couple of times, maybe." Her breath catches in her throat as Alex teases his fingers just underneath her shirt. "Should probably go somewhere with a door that locks, though." Completely contrary to her words and her plan, Addison kisses him.

They do, eventually, make it to their bedroom and lock the door.

***

Sitting at the kitchen table, Rachel sighs and kicks her legs through the air. She stares wistfully out the window, the last few Froot Loops in her bowl left forgotten and getting soggy in the milk. Rain pours down in sheets outside in a late summer storm, turning the lake and forest into a smeared mix of colors that are mostly gray.

"What's wrong, kiddo?" Meredith slides into the chair opposite Rachel. She wraps her hands around a mug of fresh coffee.

Pouting, Rachel kicks her legs harder. "Rain," she says.

She smiles softly. "Daddy said to stay inside?" Derek had managed to get Rachel breakfast before he rushed out the door. It's Meredith's day off and she's supposed to bring Rachel by the hospital for day care, but given that the road to their house has largely turned into a small river, the likelihood of that is slim; she doesn't mind – she likes Rachel, she's a good kid.

With a _very_ dramatic sigh, Rachel nods.

Meredith glances outside and smiles conspiratorially at her stepdaughter. She didn't have plans for her day off anyway, other than calling the county to have someone look at the road drainage (and that's not going to fix today's river). It's let up a little; not much, but enough that she can see individual trees again. "Wanna go?"

Rachel looks at her a little sideways with an expression that looks so much like Alex that Meredith nearly starts laughing. Rachel may biologically be Derek's and Addison's, but she has aspects of all four of them in her. It's going to make her a handful as a teenager, but right now it's cute.

"We go outside?" Rachel says, eyes wide and voice so full of hope.

"Yep," Meredith nods. "Are you finished?" she gestures at the soggy Froot Loops. At Rachel's nod, Meredith grins. "Get your rainboots," she says before sending a quick text to Derek about the road and daycare.

To Rachel's credit, she doesn't jump off her chair _quite_ hard enough to tip it over as she runs excitedly out of the kitchen.

***

Derek takes one look at the small pair of muddy purple boots sitting next to a larger pair of equally-muddy green boots and shakes his head with a smile. As he left for work that morning, he had a feeling that his request to stay inside wouldn't be heeded. He doesn't mind: Rachel loves the rain and mostly he wanted to make sure she didn't decide to go running out into it alone again. At three, Rachel doesn't do anything slowly and sprinting out into the rainy yard is how she ended up with a face full of mud the other week. Before Derek could catch her, she figured out how to slide through the mud _intentionally_. God help them if she ever decides to play softball; there won't be a pair of pants in two houses without mud stains.

The sounds of a small child running across the upstairs hall tell him he doesn't need to announce that he's home. He sets dinner on the table and listens as his daughter makes her way down the stairs, fingers crossed and half a wince on his face that she remembers to take the stairs slow. She does – two feet on each step, just like she's supposed to – and then Derek steels himself for the running tackle.

"Daddy!" Rachel shrieks as she launches herself into his arms.

"Hey kiddo," he says, hugging her tightly and giving her a kiss before lifting her up. "How was your day?"

"Outside!" she says excitedly.

Meredith joins them. "In my defense, she pouted."

"Yeah, that pout is pretty lethal," he agrees. Kissing Rachel's forehead, he sets her down. "I brought dinner," he gestures to the table with a grin. She can't read, but she knows how to recognize symbols.

Rachel jumps up and down. Her curly red pigtails bounce with her. "Barbie?" she asks excitedly.

Derek winks. She's one mini doll away from having the entire Kid's Meal collection on her shelf. He'd texted Meredith earlier to check which one Rachel was missing; he specifically asked for it tonight to complete her collection before the toys change out in a few weeks.

Once he gets Rachel settled with dinner, he pulls Meredith in for a hug and a proper kiss hello. "Good day?" he asks.

She smiles. "Good day. And it'll be even better if you tell me that," she points at the plastic _have a nice day_ bag, "is extremely spicy Thai food."

Smirking, Derek opens the bag and removes a container of curry for her. "I'm a mind reader."

***

November rolls in with a stomach bug Rachel picks up in daycare. Addison barely gets Rachel healthy enough that she can stay on schedule and stay at Derek's before she gets hit with it herself. She feels like she got run over by a train and doesn’t even try to go to work.

“Addison?” Alex calls softly that evening, not wanting to wake her up if she’s asleep.

“Living room,” she says, sounding somehow more miserable than when she woke up this morning.

He finds her on the couch, in his red plaid pajama pants and her white SGH shirt from last year’s baseball game ( _7, Montgomery_ on the back in navy blue), game controller in her hands and Super Mario Odyssey on the TV. There’s a mug of ginger tea on the coffee table next to a water bottle and a thermometer. A half-empty sleeve of saltine crackers is open on a plate. She's tucked the throw blanket around her lap, but her cheeks are flushed despite the rest of her being paler than usual.

“I suppose _how are you feeling_ is a stupid question,” Alex says.

She sniffs. “Kids are Petri dishes.” On screen, she misjudges the length of a jump and tumbles off a building. Mario respawns back at the checkpoint. “I’m really bad at this game,” she gestures with the controller.

“You got out of the jungle level,” he encourages. She'd been trying for a couple weeks, though that included a five-day rage quit where she did nothing but aggressively read books. He sits next to her.

Addison scoots farther away. “No,” she halfheartedly protests. “I’m gross and you’re gonna get sick too.”

“I live with the same Petri dish,” Alex points out, sliding his arm around her shoulder. “I’m already doomed.” He feels fine, but he spent the day in her office catching up on paperwork and pointedly _not_ seeing any patients, just in case.

Addison laughs weakly and leans into him. Alex brushes her hair out of her forehead and places his hand on her warm skin. Feverish, but nothing concerning. He kisses her forehead and watches her play for a while. As she rotates the camera to see all the parts of the puzzle, her face turns an interesting shade of pale gray-green. Alex wonders if this is perhaps not the best game for her to be playing right now.

Suddenly, Addison pauses the game and hands him the controller. With visible effort, she tries to stand. And then immediately sits back down. She presses the back of her hand against her mouth.

Without a word, Alex drags over the small trash can around from the side of the couch. They started lining it with a plastic bag when Rachel was sick and, as his wife throws up into it, he's glad they didn't stop. He gently rubs her back. When she sits up, he hands her the water bottle and takes care of the trash can.

He comes back with gum. "Want me to find you something else to play?" he asks as she takes a few hesitant sips of water.

Shaking her head, Addison lies down. "No. I'm gonna nap on you, though." She shifts around, resting her head in his lap.

Alex tugs the blanket up around her shoulders. He leans over and kisses her cheek. "I'll wake you up in a couple hours for dinner." At her sideways skeptical glance up at him, he smirks. "I've been told I make mean peanut butter crackers."

She manages a small smile. "Thank you."

"Go to sleep," he says. He swaps the game out for an episode of Ozark and keeps the volume low while Addison sleeps. He texts Richard, letting him know Addison will be out for another few days, and then Arizona, letting her know he'll at least be out tomorrow.

***

A week later and Addison leans her forehead on the cool porcelain bathtub. All of her other symptoms have cleared up – and the rest of her family is completely back to healthy – but she’s still vomiting.

“This is exhausting,” she mutters to herself as she flushes the toilet. “There is _no_ reason for this.” She glares down at her body, as if reasoning with it will make this stop.

Her eye catches the tampon box stashed between the toilet and the cabinet. Frowning, Addison’s brow furrows as a thought tries to connect two points together. Another wave of nausea rolls through her and she closes her eyes for a few minutes, breathing steadily and evenly as she waits for it to pass.

Once it does, Addison reaches up and takes her phone off the counter. According to her period tracker app, she’s five weeks late. Through the chaos of Halloween with a three-year-old who finally understood the concept, a sick kid, and then being sick herself, she hadn't noticed. And now that she’s thinking about it, she hadn’t been feeling spectacular _before_ Rachel got sick and brought it home.

Five weeks late. That’s when she knew about Rachel, too.

She looks down at her body again. It’s been a year of their non-plan. A few times she’s thought _maybe_ , but the tests were all negative. Lately they’ve been definitively _not_ talking about how their non-plan probably needs to become an actual plan.

Maybe they don’t need to have that conversation.

Turns out you can get anything delivered. Addison orders snacks, ginger ale, and a pregnancy test.

***

That night, Addison leans on their closet door, watching Alex put away laundry. She looks down at the pregnancy test again. Her rings catch the light and sparkle. What a difference four years makes.

“You’re lurking,” he says, a smile in his voice as he hangs up a shirt.

"Guilty as charged." Addison steps into the closet and sits on the little stool Rachel sometimes sits on while watching her get ready in the morning.

“How're you feeling?” He pauses and turns to her.

She's feeling much better now that she knows _why_ she's been feeling crappy. Smiling, she silently hands him the test. He was the first one to know four years ago, too.

He blinks at it and then at her. “You’re pregnant?”

Nodding, Addison's smile widens. No loitering in the hallway and counting to ten or twenty. No apprehension, no speech planning. No awkward. Just happy. “Yep.”

Alex tugs her up and into a hug. “You’re pregnant,” he repeats, holding her close.

Smiling into his shoulder, she nods. Two words of pure hope and excitement, with a healthy dose of astonishment. She loves him so much. “I’m pregnant.”

Laughing, Alex spins her around in a giddy little circle before letting go. He looks at her, then back down at the test in his hand, then back up to her in awe. And then down at the test again. “Wait, did you pee on this?”

“Yeah,” she laughs and makes a face, taking the little stick back. “Sorry.” She slides it into her pocket.

Shaking his head, Alex hugs her again. “I don’t care. I love you.”

Addison's smiling so hard her cheeks hurt. Nothing could have prepared her for this kind of joy. “I love you too.”


End file.
